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Marching to ReNew Orleans:
Clint Baker’s Brass Band marched in downtown Berkeley Friday as part of the Berkeley Public Library’s ReNew Orleans Jazz Festival. The festival began Thursday with two showings of a new film, New Orleans Music in Exile, depicting the lives of New Orleans musicians since Katrina. Photograph by Judith Scherr

News

At around 12:15 a.m. Wednesday morning, the Berkeley City Council approved the West Berkeley Bowl project by a vote of 6-0-3 with Councilmembers Max Anderson, Dona Spring and Kriss Worthington abstaining.

After hearing from more than 70 members of the public, divided between those who called for approval and those who demanded significant changes in the plans, a motion by Councilmember Dona Spring to put the issue off a week so that the question of unionization could be worked out failed 4-4-1 with Councilmembers Laurie Capitelli, Betty Olds, Gordon Wozniak and Mayor Tom Bates in opposition and Councilmember Darryl Moore abstaining.

The Judah L. Magnes Museum is in escrow to purchase the historic Armstrong College building in downtown Berkeley, sources said Monday.

The non-profit Jewish museum has signed a purchase agreement for the building, said Ted Terlecky, president of Armstrong Properties Inc., which owns the property.

The organization, currently located on Russell Street in the Elmwood District, plans to “metamorphose (the building) into a world-class museum that’s going to cost millions and millions of dollars,” he said.

According to Terlecky, museum representatives approached him in the fall about purchasing the building. An agreement was signed in April, and escrow is slated to close in November, he said.

Terry Pink Alexander, executive director of the Magnes, confirmed news of the sale but declined to discuss the matter further, saying the museum would release details later this week. Neither Alexander nor Terlecky would disclose the selling price.

The Armstrong College building, a city-designated landmark located on Harold Way at Kittredge Street, is currently leased to UC Berkeley Extension’s International Center, which has occupied the site since 1998. The university’s multi-year lease expires at the end of 2006.

Jim Sherwood, dean of UC Berkeley Extension, was caught off guard Monday when he learned from the Daily Planet that Armstrong Properties Inc. had settled on a buyer.

“We have no plans in the works” to move elsewhere, he said, adding that he hopes new owners will consider allowing the center to continue inhabiting the Armstrong College building.

The historic structure was built in 1923 by then city architect Walter H. Ratcliff Jr. Though the name of the family trust that owns the property has changed over the years, the building has never been sold, Terlecky said.

The building was designated a landmark in 1994. It features multi-pane windows, stucco siding, tiled roofs and an entrance sheltered by a Baroque-style balcony and arched windows, among other architectural highlights, said Landmarks Preservation Commissioner Leslie Emmington. Design-wise, little has changed since it was constructed, she said.

In recent months, scaffolding has gone up on the structure’s Kittredge façade to replace three rotting windows on the second floor. This incited a small stir among preservationists who said the structure was not permitted for those changes, and senior planner Janet Homrighhausen issued a work-stop order.

According to Terlecky, the installation is on hiatus because the new owners are planning a major refurbishment, and it would be pointless to proceed with improvements while the sale is in escrow, he said.

The Magnes owns additional property in Berkeley, including 2911 Russell St., a landmark site where the museum is headquartered, and 2121 Allston Way, which is currently leased out to UC Berkeley for the university’s Bancroft Library collection.

Emmington expects the non-profit to take good care of the Armstrong College building.

“They have other landmark properties, and they’ve been great conservators,” she said, “So they can be expected to do the same here.”

The state-appointed administrator of the Oakland Unified School District has confirmed that negotiations have begun with a developer over the sale or lease of prime Lake Merritt area land owned by the district, including the Paul Robeson Building administrative headquarters and several operating schools.

In a letter sent last week to OUSD Advisory Board President David Kakishiba, state administrator Randolph Ward said that a letter of intent could be signed as early as Monday, June 12, and that his office would then schedule “public hearings to review options, receive input and discuss the possibility of selling property at fair market value.”

Ward’s letter mentions 8.25 acres between 10th and 12th streets, the Lake Merritt Channel and 4th Avenue, including La Escuelita Elementary and MetWest and Dewey High Schools, but school board representatives have estimated that the inclusion of streets within the property boundaries brings the total acreage to 9.47.

According to a spokesperson in State Superintendent Jack O’Connell’s office, the final decision on the contract will be made by Ward, “but because he was appointed by Mr. O’Connell, obviously he is going to keep the state superintendent abreast of all the developments.”

It was not clear from Ward’s letter how the public hearings would be organized, though district Public Information Officer Alex Katz said by telephone that the process “will be totally transparent and will fully involve the public.”

While the proposed property disposition is expected to be raised by the public at the next school board meeting, to be held beginning at 4 p.m. this Wednesday, June 14, at the Paul Robeson Administration Building, 1025 Second Ave. in Oakland, the item is not on the meeting agenda.

It will be discussed in closed session, and Kakishiba said in a telephone interview that how much, if anything, Ward would say about the deal in public session depended upon whether the letter of intent is signed by the time of the meeting.

The letter of intent had not been signed by Monday afternoon, and district spokesperson Katz said that the signing “got pushed back a little” and was not expected by Tuesday, either.

News that contract negotiations for the proposed sale or lease of the OUSD Lake Merritt area property were reaching a final stage was first reported in the Planet last month, but since then, representatives of the State Superintendent for Public Instruction Jack O’Connell and Ward have been quiet about the proposed deal.

In his letter, Ward began his letter to School Board President Kakishiba by saying that the sale was being considered “to continue to move toward local control of the Oakland Unified School District and generate significant additional resources for schools and the classroom.”

Ward said that the contract proposal grew out of a 2004 discussion between his office and school board members over the sale or lease of the properties “as a way to pay down the debt and generate more funds for schools and students.”

The Oakland Unified School District was seized by the state in 2003 after it was forced to receive a $100 million line of credit from the state to close a massive budget deficit. About $65 million of that line of credit has been loaned to the state, with another $7 million loan for high-tech equipment approved by the state but not yet completed. The elected school board functions now as an advisory body to the state administrator, with no legal powers.

In a telephone interview Board President Kakishiba said that Ward’s letter “raises a lot of alarm bells for me” because, while Ward committed to “prioritiz[ing] the presence of La Escuelita Elementary School and the pre-kindergarten community in the Eastlake area,” Kakashiba said the state administrator “does not commit to keeping La Escelita on that site.”

“I don’t see a lot of land available in the Eastlake area to move La Escuelita,” Kakashiba said, adding that the continued residential development boom in the Eastlake/Chinatown area “makes it critical that we should be planning for the future educational needs in this community.”

Kakashiba said that while “it would be great to unload the $3.8 million debt service to the state” stemming from the state loan, he said he was concerned that school availability and expansion would be sacrificed if the proposal goes through in its present form.

“Is the state going to turn away from a multi-million dollar deal because it can’t find land to relocate La Escuelita?” he asked. “I don’t think so.”

Kakishiba said, however, that the commitment by Ward to a public input process was “a positive thing. That’s very new. I don’t think that this was contemplated before by the administration.”

In a telephone interview, Katz, the district spokesperson, said that “La Escuelita will remain here” in the Eastlake neighborhood, and that while it was not yet determined whether that location will be on the existing OUSD properties or somewhere else in the area “our commitment is to improve their situation. They have been requesting a better campus.”

The location of MetWest and Dewey High Schools on the property is less of an issue because unlike La Escuelita, these schools draw students from all over the district, and relocation to abandoned school site properties in other areas of the city would not have an impact on attendance in the Eastlake/Chinatown area.

There was also some disagreement over the role of return to local control in the proposed property sale.

Katz said that return to local control was “only one of the purposes of the proposed sale. It is ‘a’ purpose. The main purpose is to use this huge resource for the educational mission of the district, instead of seeing it crumble to the ground.”

Noting that the OUSD administration building is not earthquake safe, Katz said, “The only reason we’re doing this is to redirect this resource to the benefit of our kids and schools and for the benefit of the Eastlake neighborhood.”

Katz said that any new development in the administration building area would be an improvement over the present structure.

“It’s not like we’re going to put up a Wal-Mart here,” he said. “This is going to be a structure that improves the community.”

Still, Katz said that using the proceeds of the sale to pay down the state debt “would probably be a big step towards return to local control. State Superintendent O’Connell has said publicly that would be a factor.”

California Education Department Public Information Officer Hilary McLean said that “significant repayment of the debt will be a criteria for return to local control” of the Oakland Unified School District.

But at least one school board member, Gary Yee, said that it was unclear if the sale or lease of the property would directly lead to a return to local control, even if that money is applied to the state debt. Yee said he has taken a look at the district’s 2005 Multi-Year Recovery Plan, the document which is the state-mandated blueprint for return to local control.

“It was just a cursory look,” Yee said, “and maybe I overlooked it, but I didn’t see anything that mentioned sale of district property as part of the fiscal recovery plan.”

In its section on “Conditions for Return to Local Governance” the district’s Multi-Year Recovery Plan, put together in 2005 by Ward’s office, does not mention payment of the debt as a condition for return to local control.

Instead, referring to the SB 39 state legislation that authorized the state takeover, the recovery plan notes that “in order to have local governance returned, the district must demonstrate implementation of 138 FCMAT [Fiscal Crisis Management Assistance Team] Standards, covering five major functional areas of the district: 1) Community Relations and Governance, 2) Pupil Achievement, 3) Financial Management, 4) Personnel Management, and 5) Facilities Management, on a scale of 1 to 10. In each functional area, the district is expected to achieve an overall score of six with no individual standard within that functional area scoring below a four. When this scenario is achieved FCMAT will recommend to the Superintendent of Public Instruction that this particular condition of SB 39 has been met and thus control of that functional area should be returned to the Governing Board. [Italics and bold in the original recovery plan document.]”

FCMAT is the semi-private organization set up by the State of California to intervene to assist so-called troubled school districts.

SB 39 itself only required that the state line of credit be repaid over a 20 year period at a 1.78 percent interest rate.

Yee, who was elected to the board after the budget problems surfaced but before the district was taken over by the state, said that he was one of the trustees who initially proposed the sale of the administration building in order to prevent the state takeover. He says his position now is that the sale or lease of the Lake Merritt area school district properties should be a decision made by Oakland citizens rather than the state.

And in a letter to a local OUSD parents group email list, trustee Dan Siegel, who is retiring from the board at the end of the year, called on citizens to “organize to prevent the giveaway of the District's assets.”

“I am very concerned about the potential sale and worried about the prospect of a sweetheart deal with a politically connected developer,” Siegel wrote. “I am also very skeptical that Dr. Ward can make a deal that makes sense financially.”

Siegel added that “a sale [of the proposed property] must not only take into account the assessed value of the land, but also the costs to the District of moving and recreating the five schools and the future needs of the Eastlake and San Antonio communities for school sites. I think that it would be extremely irresponsible to sell school district property without considering these factors. …[I]t would be very foolhardy to sell property and then place the future leaders of the district in the position of having to buy additional property at much higher costs.”

The question of how to save Cody’s Books and rescue Telegraph Avenue brought a standing-room-only crowd of property and business owners, residents, street vendors, students and street people to Trinity United Methodist Church Thursday.

While a panoply of suggestions were floated at the meeting, what seemed to unite the 200 or so attendees at the Bancroft Way church was the notion that gaining economic stability should not come at the cost of the unique spirit of the street and store.

If Cody’s can’t be saved, said Leslie Berkler, head of school sales and spouse of owner Andy Ross, “We can keep the spirit of Cody’s alive.”

When he took the microphone, Ross did not take up the theme of saving the 50-year-old flagship store, which he reaffirmed would close July 10. Instead, he offered advice to a future bookseller on his corner: cut overhead, pay lower rent, run a smaller store.

Ken Sarachan, owner of Rasputin’s Records and the empty lot that sits on the corner of Haste Street and Telegraph, said he thought the area’s best bookstore is Moe’s and offered its owner $250,000 to move her store to the Cody’s site to create “a bigger and greater Moe’s.”

Someone suggested 1,000 people invest $1,000 in a Cody’s co-op.

“If Cody’s closes, it won’t be the last to close. Many are just barely hanging on,” said Councilmember Kriss Worthington, who had billed the meeting as “a wake-up, not a wake.”

He said even more critical than saving Cody’s is reviving Telegraph.

Al Geyer, owner of Annapurna, painted his vision of Telegraph: book and music stores, boutiques, classic movie theaters and monthly events.

The community can define a vision for Telegraph but it needs city help to make it work, many said. “For the last 10 years the city has been treating Telegraph like a crime problem. It should have been treated like an economic opportunity,” Ross said.

Many emphasized saving the uniqueness of Telegraph. “Now we finally see everything different being replaced by everything the same,” Eric Dynamic said. “Resist chains.”

The need for convenient parking was a recurrent theme.

Worthington said that many university lots permit evening and weekend parking, but they need clear signage to let people know.

The city was criticized for allowing large loading zones such as the nine spaces at the First Presbyterian Church, on Dana street and Channing Way, a block south of Telegraph. Also drawing heat were the yellow loading zones along Telegraph near campus that never permit customer parking and the new motorcycle parking on Telegraph south of Dwight Way that removed about 18 parking spaces.

While some hoped the city would turn part of Telegraph into a pedestrian-only mall, most speakers spoke against the idea. And several people spoke in opposition to the dedicated bus lane AC Transit proposed.

Some policies initiated years ago no longer make sense, Sarachan said: zoning that restricts the number of specific kinds of businesses was instituted when “there was a crisis with too many cookie stores. That ended 20 years ago.”

Worthington and Mayor Tom Bates have asked the council to fund a city planner to expedite permits in the Telegraph area.

A number of speakers bemoaned the loss of the Telegraph Area Association, which brought residents and business owners together. “TAA was a great little institution. It should never have lost its funding,” said Marc Weinstein, owner of Amoeba Music.

Bates targeted high rents and vacancies. “We can’t hold out for the highest possible rents,” he said, promising to meet with property owners.

While several speakers said they are not intimidated by street people exhibiting bizarre behavior, many said panhandlers keep shoppers away from the avenue.

George Beier, challenging Worthington for the Telegraph-area City Council seat, called for stepped-up police enforcement and social service outreach to curb drug and alcohol abuse on the Avenue.

While some pointed to a need for more visible foot and bike police, Dan McMullan, who has been homeless, shared another view.

“What needs to be restored is the spirit and freedom of Berkeley,” he said. “The last thing we need is more police.”

At their June 27 meeting, the City Council will vote on the budget, including funds for Telegraph: two bicycle cops, a team of social workers and a city planner. The public hearing on the budget is June 20.

They want to strengthen participatory democracy by engaging citizens in local issues. They promise to deliver your ideas to city officials and, if you are too tired for that Thursday night City Hall meeting, they will bring the City Hall to you—courtesy the Internet.

Meet the husband and wife duo of Robert Vogel and Simona Carini—founders of Berkeley’s www.kitchendemocracy.org, which could become the Craigslist for municipal government in the future.

Vogel, who used to run a software company and recently finished graduate studies in physics from UC Berkeley, confessed that he had never found time for City Council meetings in the past.

“I realized that this was definitely not good for participatory democracy,” he said. “I wanted to do something about it. I wanted to make it easier for them and decision makers in City Hall to connect to each other on issues that mattered to citizens. And thus KD was born in March.”

With a background in literature, nursing, and clinical database management, Carini is the perfect

partner for Vogel. Quick and articulate, she keeps regular tabs on every new comment that residents send their way every day. The website currently posts a maximum of 20 new comments daily, which get screened first for personal attacks.

When asked why they chose the name Kitchen Democracy, Robert said, “It’s because we think that people’s participation nurtures democracy like healthy food. It’s as simple as that.”

On Kitchen Democracy, Berkeley residents can also read about local issues from experts who represent many sides, both inside and outside City Hall.

“The meetings are often held late at night, and a lot of people who attend have no clue about the background of the issue,” Vogel said. “People usually have to speak very quickly because of the time limit. The experts’ page is a great place to start to clear your doubts.”

Residents can also vote on an issue and see the comments of their neighbors and those of neighboring communities. Anyone living within 50 miles of Berkeley is welcome to vote and post comments on the website but only registered Berkeley voters are included in the Kitchen Democracy tally.

Some of these comments have been noticed by City Hall. Vogel gave the example of Bolfing’s Hardware on College Avenue, which was seeking city permission to renovate and build three housing units. Two-hundred-and-forty people wrote Kitchen Democracy to express support for those changes.

“It felt great to help the local small business community of the Elmwood shopping district in some way because its members always face competition from bigger chains,” he said. “We want to do more stuff like that.”

Three months after setting up shop, Kitchen Democracy has gained the attention of Berkeley officials.

“Kitchen Democracy provides a forum for residents of Berkeley to express their views and ideas on some of the issues that come before the Planning Commission,” said Susan Wengraf, city planning commissioner. “For those people who cannot come to commission meetings, it creates an invaluable way for me to learn what they are thinking about specific issues so that I can make an informed decision in my role as commissioner.”

Vogel explained that the website features topics based on “how interested the council members are about an issue. Presently we are working mainly with councilmember Gordon Wozniak, who represents District 8, which is the district we belong to, but we are slowly expanding to all the other districts.”

Vogel said that about 450 Berkeley residents are now using their website, but hopes Kitchen Democracy becomes a place all 70,000 registered voters in Berkeley will use. Vogel also hopes to start putting up the ZAB agenda and the City Council agenda on the website soon.

“We want to bring up local issues significant to every district.” he said. “Currently, some of the issues residents are voting on are whether the language of the BUSD parcel tax ballot measure should incorporate the BeSMaart recommendation and if the Berkeley Transportation and Planning Commissions should hold public hearings on the Bus Rapid Transit project.”

Recently, 27 registered voters voted yes on the issue of whether or not the traffic diverter at Domingo and Hazel streets should become a community garden, a project which was approved May 31.

According to Councilmember Wozniak: “Kitchen Democracy is a great tool to help me better understand my constituents’ opinions on specific issues and to help them arrive at an informed opinion . . . I’ve checked the website twice a day to read the comments and the vote tallies.”

Vogel said he is proud of the role the website is beginning to have in civic affairs and its potential to keep Berkeley’s elected officials honest.

“KD is probably the first of its kind,” Vogel says. “I don’t think anything like this exists anywhere else. What makes it really interesting is that it serves as a community memory. In a year from now, people will be able to go back and see it if City Hall’s decisions reflect that of the community, . . . if the City Hall actually keeps its word.”

Rick Ayers is a mild-mannered, genial guy, just shy of 60, with an affinity for travel, opera and Greek tragedy. He is also, according to students at Berkeley High School, the Community Arts and Sciences Original Gangsta’.

That’s “CAS OG” for short, CAS being the small school within a larger school he cofounded at Berkeley High, and O.G. being “a comrade of long standing, a veteran or elder,” according to the Berkeley High School Slang Dictionary, which he helps produce. Ayers, who earned his OG stripes teaching media, journalism and English at Berkeley High for more than a decade, retires this year.

Ayers, 59, is credited with galvanizing the small schools movement in Berkeley and navigating the choppy political waters of Berkeley High to advocate for CAS, where he is lead teacher, and small schools in general.

His legacy at Berkeley High includes work as the advisor to the school newspaper, The Berkeley High Jacket, when students famously broke a story on a Berkeley landlord accused of importing Indian girls for indentured servitude. He has authored several books on education; the most recent, Great Books for High School Kids: A Teacher’s Guide to Books That Can Change Teens’ Lives, was written up in the San Francisco Chronicle last month. He also works part-time teaching curriculum at the University of San Francisco.

Ayers takes leave of Berkeley High to pursue a Ph.D. in education at UC Berkeley.

“I work very hard, I’m up at 5 a.m.,” he said recently at his home in North Oakland. “I would find it impossible to even go down to part-time (at Berkeley High). I felt if I was going to move on, I would have to make a clean break … I am tired, you know? I’m 59 years old.”

Ayers spent much of his working adult life as a chef before turning to teaching in his 40s, after watching his eldest daughter struggle in high school. At Berkeley High, Ayers secured his first—and to this date only—high school teaching position.

“Teaching has been incredible for me,” he said. “It’s the best job I’ve ever had, the best opportunity to make a difference.”

Not that it’s been an easy ride.

Ayers formed CAS as a program at Berkeley High nine years ago with fellow teacher Bill Pratt, confident that students learn most effectively in small, diverse communities. Not everyone agreed. When Ayers and others mobilized to reinvent Berkeley High as a medley of small schools, they met marked resistance.

The school board compromised and OK’d a partial restructure, in which some small schools coexist within the larger school. In 2003, CAS opened its doors as Berkeley High’s first small school. Today there are four.

Ayers is used to rustling feathers. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan—where he dated the late comedian Gilda Radner—he was drafted into the army and immediately took to organizing anti-war sentiment. When his company was deployed to Vietnam, he went AWOL, subsequently joining up with the Weather Underground, a radical anti-war group responsible for dynamiting public buildings like draft boards, prison offices and, most notably, the Pentagon. (Ayers declines to comment what activities he was involved in—if any.)

He grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, his father a businessman, his mother a stay-at-home mom. In high school, Ayers was part of a self-described “nerdy, artsy group,” and though a precocious student, he felt stifled by his surroundings.

“I was in honky heaven, and we were just dying,” he said. “Every time we could, we went out to Chicago and would hang out at blues clubs and go to museums.”

Ayers never completed his studies at the University of Michigan. After seven years on the lam, he turned himself into authorities and spent 10 days in jail. He finished his undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley in nutrition sciences and went on to receive a master’s from Mills College in education.

In his first years at Berkeley High, Ayers realized the limitations of teaching in a large school. Students filed in and out of his classes like strangers. Forging student-teacher relationships wasn’t part of the equation. Ayers worked to change that.

At CAS, where there are about 60 kids in each grade, students enroll in the same courses, have the same teachers and occupy the same physical space. The benefit?

“You gain community,” he said.

CAS students take on internships at hospitals, schools and other community institutions. They have traveled to foreign countries like Cuba and Mexico to learn about social justice. They participate in media literacy projects: the Berkeley High School Slang Dictionary, a class project where students contribute to an index of contemporary teen argot, is the most prominent example.

But the small schools experiment has not reached the heights Ayers hoped it would. Ayers and other small schools advocates are convinced the advantages of small schools can only be fully realized if all of Berkeley High is divided into small communities—which isn’t expected to happen anytime soon.

“There’s part of me that’s like, ‘I don’t want to spend my whole career at Berkeley High School, and not be able to do the work I want to do.’ It’s frustrating,” he said. “Do I want to spend the next seven years on this program with one hand tied behind my back?”

So he’s getting out—though he feels ambivalent about it. “I’m very torn about leaving,” he said.

After completing the Ph.D. program at UC Berkeley, Ayers plans to move on to training teachers, in hopes of instilling his own passion for teaching in others:

“As I think back on my career, I started out making a lot of mistakes, and looking at my class this week, that still happens,” he said. “I still fail—and succeed—on different days. But that’s what’s so beautiful about teaching.”

A celebration for Rick Ayers is scheduled for Saturday, June 17, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. at Berkeley High School’s Donahue Gym.

The question of whether property owners should be allowed to put parking on side or back yards “by right”—with a simple across-the-counter permit—or whether they should have to obtain Administrative Use Permits, which kicks in a process to alert neighbors of a project, is among the more thorny questions before the City Council tonight (Tuesday).

Also before the council is the question of whether the Berkeley Bowl should get a use permit and be allowed to move forward with its proposed West Berkeley store. The question of a unionized workforce and traffic concerns are likely to be under consideration.

Parking

Planning staff argued, in a June 13 report to the council on the question of allowing back and side yard parking, that few parcels would be affected “because there are relatively few lots on which such new parking can be accommodated.”

“That’s complete nonsense,” responded citizen activist Robert Lauriston in a phone interview Monday. He said that structures on many of Berkeley’s small property lots could be built higher if under the new ordinance owners were permitted to pave over the backyard to accommodate parking.

“There are literally hundreds of lots that would be affected,” he said.

Lauriston further argued that commercial establishments that back up on residential neighborhoods must now have a 10-foot landscaped barrier between parking and the residence. That buffer would be eliminated under the new ordinance, he said.

City staff claimed in its report that requiring an administrative use permit would slow projects, add to homeowner frustration and increase demand on planning staff time.

Unavailable

The council will also be reviewing a UC Berkeley draft environmental impact report that includes Memorial Stadium.

The staff report on the project was not available before the Daily Planet deadline on Monday.

Also on the agenda, but not available to the press and public until late Monday afternoon, is the city attorney’s report on why public financing of elections will not make the November ballot.

The council’s 2006-2007 budget update was also not available.

Budget questions

While the City Council is not slated to vote on its 2006-2007 budget until June 27, councilmembers are proposing to add a number of expenditures to the growing list. An affirmative council vote does not approve the item, but allows it to go to the next stage of consideration. A public hearing on the budget will be held June 20.

The council will consider a $1 million request by councilmembers Betty Olds and Gordon Wozniak to restore funding to the Fire Department. (The Fire Department had asked for $800,000-$900,000, according to Assistant Chief David Orth.)

When cuts were made last year, the department eliminated its overtime expenses by introducing a system they call “brown-outs,” which means that when there were absences, staff did not work overtime, but was shifted away from a station. (The department began with brown-outs at two stations, found it impacted service and, with $300,000 from the council, continued with brown-outs at one station only.)

“At this point, no incident delay in response time has cropped up,” Orth said, noting that, in the beginning, firefighters were so conscious of doing things more quickly—such as getting into firefighting gear—that the response time was actually quicker.

Other budget requests include:

• $60,000 to implement and monitor an ordinance whereby the city avoids purchasing goods made in sweatshops;

• $10,000 for the West Berkeley Neighborhood Corporation, $6,000 of which is for the 2007 International Food Festival and $4,000 is for the corporation’s operating budget;

• $120,000 to restore funding for staffing the Office of Emergency Services;

• $10,000 to restore funding to the Center for Accessible Technology, cut from $20,000 in the 2004-2005 budget. The center provides computer technology and training for people with disabilities.

• $50,000 to create and staff a Public Safety Commission to focus on reducing crime.

Crime report

At 5 p.m., preceding the 7 p.m. council meeting, the police chief will present a report on the status of crime and crime-reduction strategies in the city.

Attempting to balance Berkeley’s ever-mounting gridlock with smart economic growth, the Planning Commission will consider a program that charges transit fees for future development projects.

The Transportation Services Fee (TSF) program would impose tolls on development shown to exacerbate Berkeley’s vehicular traffic. Fees would depend on the nature of the project and the amount of traffic generation anticipated. Those funds would support alternative transportation programs, like EcoPass and the Downtown Berkeley Bike Station, among others.

Planning commissioners are slated Wednesday to hold a public hearing and possibly take action to recommend the program to the City Council.

The Planning Commission looked into adopting transportation services fees in November per recommendations from the Transportation Commission but declined to pass a resolution expressing support. Commissioners cited concerns with the fee schedule, which charged higher rates overall and failed to distinguish between new development and change-of-use projects.

According to Planning Commissioner Harry Pollack, the proposal overlooked broader land use issues.

“It was not done with a planning perspective, it was only done wearing transportation glasses,” he said.

The updated proposal, developed by transportation, planning and economic development staff, would exact a fee of $2,543 per car trip generated on new buildings and $1,381 on existing structures redeveloped for new use.

A new 1,000-square-foot café, for instance, would rack up $4,059 in transportation services fees, but converting a comparably sized space from a retail outlet to a café would not involve any transit costs because it would not likely generate additional traffic.

Pollack lauded the structure, pointing out that a flat fee could deter businesses from setting up shop in Berkeley.

“For existing buildings, a fee generally is not a good thing because it will make it more difficult to change uses,” he said. “As we see from Cody’s and Radstons and the empty storefronts downtown, we have enough trouble keeping stores.”

The new fee proposal also cuts a deal for “priority uses,” or projects designated by city plans as germane to neighborhood revitalization and economic development. Those include: theaters, food service and product stores, exercise and dance studios, nightlife establishments, childcare facilities, nursing homes, community centers and several others. Affordable housing would be exempt from any transportation fees.

With the exception of the latter use, Transportation Commissioner Rob Wrenn said he is completely against reducing the fee for certain projects. “This won’t generate any money,” he said. “It’s a joke. It’s letting developers off the hook.”

Steve Wollmer, a vociferous opponent of a proposed mixed-use building at 1885 University Ave. that would include a Trader Joe’s grocery store, agreed, pointing out that giving some projects priority over others could encourage developers to lobby for exemptions.

“They won’t be paying for the real impact they’re going to have,” he said. Projects like 1885 University Ave. “have enormous impacts, and you’re saying you’re going to exempt them? It opens the door to all kinds of pleading from other sources.”

Several East Bay cities levy transportation fees in some form. For a mixed-use 176-unit apartment-retail structure, developers in Fremont would pay more than $348,000 in transportation and traffic fees. In Emeryville, the levy would be around $94,000, compared with almost $104,000 in Berkeley.

Erecting a new café would involve roughly $5,000 in transit costs in Emeryville and Fremont, and slightly less ($4,059) in Berkeley.

Berkeley used to require developers to pay transportation fees, but due to legal uncertainties, the city ceased collecting, said Pollack.

The TSF program would fund marketing and incentive campaigns aimed at encouraging alternatives to cars, transit service and signage improvements, and pedestrian and bicycle facilities.

City staff expects the program proposal to move to the City Council by July 11.

On Wednesday, the Planning Commission will also take a look at the Landmarks Preservation Ordinance, City Council action on the Creeks Ordinance revision and recommendations on the UC Berkeley Southeast Campus Integrated Projects draft environmental impact report. The meeting takes place at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave.

The Berkeley High School Men’s Lightweight 4+ boat powered its way to a gold medal at the U.S. Rowing National Youth Championship in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Sunday.

The Women’s Varsity 4+ boat placed first in the petite final. Both teams qualified for this national competition by medaling in the U.S. Rowing Southwest Regional Junior Championship Regatta May 20 and 21 at Lake Natoma in Folsom.

Berkeley High School and Saint Ignatius College Prep High School were the only two Bay Area teams to come home with gold medals from the U.S. Rowing National Youth Championships.

As the only public high school competing in California, the Berkeley High rowers compete against much larger club teams and private schools that recruit athletes from a broad range of students. Funding for the Berkeley High Crew team comes primarily from parents and family members. No more than 5 percent of the overall team budget comes from the school district.

The Berkeley boat came in first by two and a half seconds, qualifying them to advance to the semi-finals on Saturday. In the Saturday semi-finals Berkeley just made it to advance to the finals, coming in third. In the final race on Sunday, Berkeley High came in first by more than two seconds over the competition.

The Women’s Varsity 4+ boat, composed of sophomores Rosa Cox and Emma Cox and seniors Katherine Powelson, Jessie Moritz and Phoebe Kasdin as coxswain, and coached by Rob Welsh, competed on Friday in the first of three heats coming in third. This meant the women needed to go to the repechage the next day to make the semi-final.

The Berkeley boat came in first in their Saturday morning repechage by over six seconds advancing them to the semi-finals later that same day. In that race, the Berkeley women’s boat come in fourth, which sent the women to the petite finals on Sunday where Berkeley finished first by nearly four seconds.

Though foes of a planned mall at Golden Gate Fields collected enough signatures to qualify an initiative for the November ballot, the race track’s owners have filed a legal challenge.

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Judith Ford Wednesday ordered a July 19 hearing on Pacific Racing Association’s motion for a writ of mandate and a permanent injunction blocking the initiative.

Pacific Racing Association is the legal name of the entity that owns the track and is in turn owned by Magna Entertainment Corporation.

At issue is whether or not proponents of the Albany Waterfront Specific Plan Initiative failed to issue proper public notice before they began circulating petitions to qualify their measure for the ballot.

The initiative would ban new development within 500 feet of the shoreline and create a planning process for new projects outside that limit. The boundary would effectively block plans by track owner Magna Entertainment and Los Angeles developer Rick Caruso to build an upscale open air mall at the site.

Citizens for the Albany Shoreline (CAS) collected 2,446 signatures from Albany voters, nearly three times the number required, which they turned in to City Clerk Jacqueline Bucholz on May 16.

But the petition filed Monday alleges that the signatures have to be tossed out because the initiative’s backers failed to give proper legal notice before they began collecting them.

The state Elections Code requires initiative sponsors to publish notice of their plans in a paper that a judge has previously declared eligible for printing the notices.

Initiative backers printed their notice in the West County Times, the same paper regularly used by the city for its notices.

Albany City Attorney Robert Zweben said that while the paper hasn’t been judicially recognized, the city publishes notices there because it is widely read in the community.

“We satisfy the legal requirement by posting notices in the city,” he said. The state Elections Code allows the requirement to be fulfilled by posting the notices prominently in at least three locations within the community.

Zweben said court rulings on the issue are mixed. While some cases have cited the need for specific compliance, in recent cases findings have looked at whether or not the intent of the law was fulfilled.

“Their response could be, ‘Do you think the 2,400 people who signed didn’t know what they signed,’” he said.

“I’m not going to predict the outcome, but there’s a significant risk” for the initiative’s proponents, Zweben said.

“Magna’s attack is aimed at keeping the initiative off the ballot,” said Sally Douglas Arce, one of the initiative’s proponents. “Despite the fact that this initiative has received extensive press and TV coverage, Magna’s lawyers are claiming there was inadequate public notice.”

“This is a heavy-handed effort by the race track to prevent the citizens of Albany from voting on an initiative for waterfront planning, said CAS co-chair Bill Dann.

Named as defendants in the action were Bucholz, the Albany City Council and Alameda County Registrar of Voters Brad Clark.

An apartment dweller at 2125 Ninth St. learned that walking out of rooms where candles are burning is anything but wise.

It was shortly after 5 a.m. last Wednesday when the resident of the lower unit in a two-story, two-unit structure discovered that the pleasant warm flicker of burning wax had been replaced by a raging inferno.

A second bad decision followed, in the attempt to extinguish the blaze before making that all-important 9-1-1 call, said Deputy Fire Chief David P. Orth.

By the time firefighters arrived, flames were roaring in the adjacent kitchen as well, and before the last ember was quenched, the blaze had done an estimated $150,000 in damage to the structure and $25,000 to contents.

Most of the damage was confined to the lower unit, Orth said.

Truck arson

Firefighters rushed to 1500 block of Second Street just after 11 p.m. Wednesday to discover that a 2002 Chevrolet 1500 pickup was fully engulfed in flames.

Subsequent investigation revealed that the blaze had been intentionally set, triggering a criminal investigation that is still continuing, Orth said.

Electrical fire

A short circuit on a work bench ignited a blaze inside an auto repair shop at 1809 San Pablo Ave. sometime before 8:30 p.m. Friday.

The ensuing flames did $75,000 in property damage and about $25,000 in contents to the shop and a nearby structure, said Orth.

Despite rumors to the contrary, the Ashby BART Task Force is very much alive—though in what form and to what ends remain open questions.

Members and concerned neighbors gathered in the South Berkeley Senior Center Monday night for their first meeting since Caltrans denied a city request for $120,000 to plan a development at the station’s main parking lot.

Mayor Tom Bates and City Councilmember Max Anderson were also on hand, to expand the scope of the city’s focus from the BART station parking lot to the entire Adeline Street corridor from Ward Street to the Oakland border.

And to do it, they said they’d ask their fellow councilmembers for support and money—with the possibility of applying for another Caltrans grant in October to tackle the parking afresh.

Bates said he was especially interested in the area where Adeline merges with Martin Luther King Jr. Way.

“It’s an incredible piece of property,” he said, “and it needs to be examined.”

Just what form the planning process might take is undecided, he said. “All bets are off, and we need to hear from all points of view.”

The mayor said he and Anderson “need to go back and look at the city’s budget, to see if there’s money available. And Max and I are prepared to do that.”

One thing that is off the table, said Bates, is eminent domain. “We are not going to us it. Full stop,” he said. “What we are talking about is the public right of way . . . curb to curb.”

One possibility, he said, would be closing one set of lanes of the divided Adeline Street, and relating them adjacent to the other set, opening up the site and most of the median to develop—perhaps as a strip park and shopping area.

“Where Adeline and MLK merge, it is a major wide boulevard. I would like to slow it down and make it more livable and beautiful,” Bates said. “I would like people to study it, I want ideas. I want people who live there.”

Many of the public who spoke and some members—including Co-Chair Toya Groves—said they wanted to see the task force enlarged to include more residents of the immediate area.

“We should add members from the community, then go ahead with creating a vision for the neighborhood,” said Groves, who suggested adding Elaine Green, Kenoli Oleari, and several others who have shown up for the meeting.

The panel currently contains only one African American, yet the project is in the heart of one of Berkeley’s key African American neighborhoods—a point raised by critics at the group’s meeting two weeks earlier.

“I think the task force as currently constituted could do the job,” said Bates.

“I will fight for the existence of this task force,” said Anderson, rejecting any suggestion that its composition should be changed.

Ed Church, the consultant who selected nominees for the group, had refused to announce criteria for member selection or specify a size for the task force before the panel was named—a source of ongoing criticism.

While Bates and Anderson have said the task force was created by the resolution the city council passed in December when it authorized applying for the Caltrans grant, critics likes Osha Neumann and Robert Lauriston disagree.

Neumann, who lives across MLK from the BART station, is attorney for Community Services United, the coalition of non-profits that sponsors the flea market. Lauriston, who lives east of Adeline, is the organizer of Neighbors of Ashby BART, a coalition of neighbors which formed to challenge the building of 300-plus condos and retail shops over the main BART parking lot.

That was the project spelled out in the Caltrans grant, though Bates and Anderson have said 300 would be the maximum number of units, rather than the minium as specified in the grant proposal.

While Bates said he was open to any project, Anderson said he wanted to see housing, especially for “people who work at the university, child care providers, people who work for the city, many of whom make $25,000 to $40,000 a year.”

Anderson said providing housing at a major transit hub would reduce car use and emissions in a neighborhood with troublesome asthma levels—though one angry audience member who said he had a child with a serious asthma problem asked how adding the cars needed by the occupants of 300 or so new apartments could reduce exhaust.

Many of the African Americans who came Monday were participants in the Berkeley Flea Market, whose members played a major role in the verbal outbursts during the last task force meeting.

One flea market participant, who identified himself as “Buffalo Soldier 92 and 93,” interrupted frequently, drawing angry glances and sharp words from Anderson and even causing the usually unflappable Bates to momentarily lose his composure.

He was also critical of Neumann, repeatedly declaring that the attorney represented CSU and not the vendors.

Co-chair John Selawsky said everything should be on the table, but didn’t give outright endorsement to expanding the committee’s membership.

Another member, Mike Friedrich of Livable Berkeley, initially suggested the task force report back to the City Council and then suspend meeting until the council gave it new directions.

When it came time for a vote on disbanding, only Friedrich voted yes. He later voted with the majority to meet again in two weeks. The Senior Center had already been reserved before the word on the grant came down from Sacramento.

Radstons Office Plus, celebrating its 98th birthday this year, will shut the doors to its 1950 Shattuck Avenue retail store on July 14. Founded in 1908, the store is in its third generation of ownership.

“It’s difficult to point a finger at any particular reason for the closure,” said Diane Griffin, president of Radstons. “Let’s just say that it’s all things Berkeley, topped off with the fact that our lease ran out. We just couldn’t afford to pay the prohibitive increase in rent anymore as there wasn’t enough profit out of our downtown retail store. I hope both my father and grandfather who ran the business before me are looking down and understanding the decision we had to take.”

Under Griffin, Radstons became a major, independently owned provider of business products to offices around the Bay Area. According to Griffin, the store closure will allow resources to be more focused on its core delivery business in Hercules, which accounts for 90 percent of the company’s sales and caters to public institutions and small- to medium-sized, independently owned businesses.

The decision to close the store was made by Griffin and her husband Sterling in April when they realized that they would not be able to sign another five-year lease.

“It was painful to say the least,” she said. “After the state health building opposite to the store closed down we just didn’t get enough foot traffic anymore. In this age of instant gratification, where everything is done over the Internet, it is extremely difficult to sell office products at retail.”

Mayor Tom Bates, in a telephone interview, said, “We are sorry to hear that Radstons is closing down because it’s not being able to continue with its lease. It was an integral part of downtown Berkeley. Times are definitely changing and the downtown area is seeing a whole lot of changes everyday. There are some positive things happening as well—such as boutique hotels, condos, and jazz clubs that will hopefully help to make the place more attractive.”

The city’s commercial department is now taking bids from office suppliers for an annual contract of $500,000 under which the city will be buying office supplies. Usually preference is given to local merchants for contracts under $25,000, but in this case the contract value is higher. Griffin said he is hopeful that Radstons’ commercial business will win the bid.

All current employers at Radstons Berkeley location will be out of their jobs on July 14, but they will all receive severance packages.

Terence Epps, who has been with the store for the last six years, lamented the closure. “I am going to be pounding on the pavements as of July 15,” he said. “What makes me sad to see this place go is that it offered a very unique retail experience.”

According to Zelda Bronstein, Berkeley mayoral candidate and former Planning Commission chair, the loss of Radstons is a variation of the loss of Cody’s. “Here we have another longtime, respected Berkeley retailer shutting down. Phoenix Opticals and Cody’s both closed down, and now it’s Radstons. It’s really sad that this is happening in Berkeley, a city know for its independent spirit.”

Alison Paskal, who works for UC Berkeley, was picking up stationary at Radstons on Thursday afternoon. “The city needs to be involved to support these businesses and to keep it a city free from stores you’ll find at shopping malls,” she said. “Therein lies the charm of Berkeley.”

Gary Shows of Alko Office Supply Store in downtown Berkeley—the sole remaining independent office supply store in the city—said times were rough for them as well.

“Although being the only office supply store left now might help us, there is more stationery than customers,” Shows said. “Half of my block is empty with Eddie Bauer and Gateway moving out. Shoppers need to be downtown to come into the store and that’s not happening anymore.”

Shows commented that the city used to buy office supplies from local stores more actively about ten years ago but that changed after the big box stores came into the picture. The same, he said was the situation with UC’s procurement department.

“UC Berkeley is aggressively trying to get departments to buy from Office Max, with whom they established a contract in January 2005,” he said. “They have suddenly stopped supporting us. My customers from UC have received letters telling them they shouldn’t buy from local stores. It’s fast becoming a situation where local resources are no longer being kept in the community.”

Though city officials say owner Glen Yasuda hasn’t withdrawn his application to build a store and warehouse complex at Ninth Street and Heinz Avenue, they also say the project faces serious roadblocks.

The first issue is rising construction costs, says city Economic Development Director Dave Fogarty.

The second issue—and by far the more politically charged—is union representation of future workers.

“There’s no way this City Council will pass a general plan amendment without assurances that they comply with fair labor standards,” said City Councilmember Dona Spring.

The issues will come to a head at Tuesday night’s City Council meeting, where councilmembers will be asked to vote on amendments to the city’s General Plan and Zoning Ordinance and to endorse a use permit for the project.

To help them in their decisions, councilmembers will be pondering 3,000 pages of documents on the complex battles that have dogged the project’s progress.

Fogarty said he has been in frequent contact with Dan Kataoka, the Bowl’s general manager, and with Glen Yasuda, who owns the store with his spouse, Diane.

“They have not notified the city that they are withdrawing their application,” said Fogarty. “That would require a formal letter. But Ben has indicated they are unhappy.”

“We have not heard anything formally from them, but it is my understanding that the project is still on,” said Dan Marks, the city’s Director of Planning and Development.

Construction costs

The biggest hurdle, Fogarty said, has been the sharp increase in construction costs since the Yasudas purchased the West Berkeley site in May 2002.

“They submitted their application in November 2002, and here we are finally getting ready to vote on it on Tuesday, June 13, 2006. That’s a lot of time,” Fogarty said.

In the interim, economic factors both in the United States and in China—where a massive building boom is consuming a huge share of the world’s concrete and steel—have seen construction prices soaring. Because the manufacture of both materials requires massive amounts of energy, skyrocketing energy prices have boosted prices even higher.

Current plans calls for a total of 97,970 square feet in two buildings and 201 parking spaces, 99 of them in an underground lot.

The complex would feature both a retail store and warehouse facilities to serve both the new store and the existing store at Oregon Street and Shattuck Avenue.

“The type of construction they’re planning, with an underground parking lot that requires excavation and lots of concrete, the prices have gone way up. Contractors can charge premium prices,” he said.

Fogarty said he has seen the estimates contractors have given the store, but wouldn’t comment on the numbers, beyond saying they are “very high.”

Troubled labor history

A study in contradictions, the Bowl is both the epitome of the socially conscious grocery store, offering an incomparable array of organic and hard-to-find goodies, and, critics say, the prototypical union-busting firm—forced finally to accept a contract in the face of federal action.

Workers had rejected the union by a 119 to 70 vote in 2003, but the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that managers employed unfair labor practices. The store paid settlements to two pro-union workers fired during the organizing effort.

A second vote last August resulted in a 107-13 vote in favor of a contract with the United Food and Commercial Workers Butcher’s Local 120 last August.

That pact excluded employees at the proposed West Berkeley store.

Zoning Adjustments Board member David Blake brought up the union issue during the May 11 hearing where construction and the project’s Environmental Impact Report were approved.

“We were told the labor issue has not been resolved,” said Blake.

“The Berkeley Bowl philosophy has always been to allow the employees to make the decision,” said Dan Kataoka, manager of store at 2020 Oregon St. “It is not right for the people of this board or people in the audience to impose their will on our employees.”

Fogarty said Kataoka has told him “they feel chagrined about the NLRB decision. They know they did things they shouldn’t have done, because there was a period when they had no legal representation.”

Blake asked if the old store would be closed if the new one wasn’t organized.

“We will not close it,” said Kataoka. “It will be our core store.”

ZAB member Andy Katz called for a “card check,” a process by which employers recognize a union if a majority of workers sign cards certifying their desire for a union.

“No.” said Kataoka. “We believe in the democratic process,” that is, holding an election.

Fogarty said Thursday that union elections have faced long delays in recent years.

“Because the NLRB is controlled by the Republicans, elections take a long time these days,” he said.

Delays pose problems for union organizers, because of the high turnover typical of the grocery business, he said.

“A huge percentage of elections now don’t result in union representation,” he said.

One rumor circulating Thursday had Yasuda pulling his plans for the retail store but using the site only for a warehouse—a move that would not require a change from the existing zoning, and which would strip the council of its power to impose a pro-labor condition.

“The city doesn’t have to give a zoning change unless it feels it is getting something of equal value in return,” said Blake. The thing of value could be a pro-union requirement. No zoning change, however, means no gift—potentially short-circuiting a pro-labor requirement.

Other opposition

The store has run into other opposition, both from those who oppose the location outright and from neighbors who like the store but want assurances that traffic impacts will be mitigated.

The most vocal opposition has come from merchants, industries and artists who oppose the location and the rezoning that will reduce the amount of space zoned for manufacturing and light industrial uses in West Berkeley.

Other objections focus on traffic impacts on the already crowded Ashby and San Pablo avenues.

More focused opposition has come from administrators and the parents of students at the Ecole Bilingue de Berkeley, better known as the French School, which is located catercorner from the store site at Ninth and Heinz.

School-related objections seek protections for students who arrive and leave the school during weekdays.

But many West Berkeley residents say they welcome the store, which will bring fresh food into an area of the city currently without a grocery store.

If past meetings of the Planning Commission and Zoning Adjustments Board where the project was discussed are any indication, the public comment section at Tuesday night’s council meeting could be memorable.

After almost two years of staff-management strife, a page has turned at the Berkeley Public Library: Wednesday evening the Board of Trustees announced the departure of the embattled library director and the appointment of an interim replacement.

It took a joint meeting of the City Council and Board of Trustees to approve a settlement with Director Jackie Griffin, who had threatened to sue the city if she were fired and another closed-door session of the library board to approve the temporary appointment of Interim Director Roger Pearson.

Griffin’s four years and 10 months at the library brought the controversial and expensive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) check-out system, staff cut-backs and a host of complaints from library workers who say their input was ignored and that they faced retaliation for speaking out. While her last official day at work is today (Friday), she was not at the library on Thursday. Attempts to reach her for comment were unsuccessful.

While workers and union representatives greeted the decisions with optimism, they told the Daily Planet they would not be satisfied until the violations they say they suffered under the ousted management have been rectified.

Andrea Segall, librarian and union shop steward, said in an interview outside the council-trustee closed-door meeting that negative letters in personnel files should be removed, people with requests to transfer away from managers with whom they are in conflict should be honored, and people whose promotions were denied because of conflict with Griffin should be promoted.

A majority of the staff signed a statement of no confidence in Griffin, delivered to the City Council and Board of Trustees in April.

“The employees are thirsty for someone to listen to them, to be receptive to their ideas,” said Anes Lewis-Partridge, senior field representative from Service Employees International Union 535, addressing the Board of Trustees during the public portion of their meeting.

The hope is that new management “will come with an open mind and open ears,” she said.

In the settlement agreement signed by Griffin and her attorney Jonathan Siegel, Griffin promises not to sue the city. Reached by phone on Thursday, Siegel declined to say on what grounds Griffin, an at-will employee, had threatened to sue.

The settlement leaves Griffin on the city payroll using accrued vacation time until the end of June. She will also be paid $34,000, equal to three months salary, get airfare and hotel expenses at a library conference in New Orleans for $1,500 and receive medical benefits for six months equal to $6,200.

Emerging from the closed-door session, trustees introduced Interim Director Pearson to the group of library workers and the union representative who had remained in the lobby during the more-than-two-hour trustees’ executive session.

Pearson retired as Sonoma County Library director in 2001 and since has served as interim library director in Spokane, Wash.; Dixon; Kansas City, Mo.; Sonoma County and at the College of Marin.

“I’m in a dream career, I get to meet so many people all over the country,” Pearson told the Daily Planet, adding that he did not want to talk more about the job until he has signed papers and is in the position.

Until Pearson steps in around July 1, Trustee Chair Susan Kupfer and Vice Chair Powell will manage the library and have the authority to designate managers to act in their stead.

Passing the resolution to delegate that authority (the vote was 4-1 with Trustee Ying Lee in opposition) sparked some controversy during the Trustees’ open session.

Lee argued that decisions should be made in consultation with all five trustees. “I hope this is a new chapter,” Lee said. “I want to be sure there is a clean slate.”

About a dozen library workers came by the meetings, many sitting on the carpet outside the closed sessions at the sixth-floor city administration building meeting room. As they watched the closed doors, they shared hopes with each other about how they’d like to see the library—one where managers were out front with patrons and library workers, and where library workers would have time to spend with patrons, recommending books and helping to find them on the shelves.

Lewis-Partridge told the Daily Planet that the removal of the director was just the first step. The fight would not be over until conditions improve at the library.

“We said from the very beginning that we’re not going away,” she said.

“I needed a lot of help with fractions, but Mr. H is helping me, so now I’m doing better,” she said, proudly pointing up the As she’s been getting on her report card.

Rodriguez, a student at Sobrante Park Elementary School in Oakland, attends small group tutorials twice a week as part of a No Child Left Behind initiative that requires underperforming schools to offer free supplementary educational services to low-income students.

Her tutor Victor Hernandez, or “Mr. H” as she calls him, is a former middle and high school teacher now working part-time for a tutoring company while he goes to culinary school. He believes after-school intervention is a boon to his students, many of whom are English language learners and have fallen behind in traditional classrooms.

“It’s helpful with regard to helping students take standardized tests and gives them a little more latitude” to learn in a safe environment, he said.

Anecdotal evidence aside, there is little accountability built into the No Child Left Behind program. Poor planning and management difficulties, low participation rates, high costs and a lack of comprehensive research round out a laundry list of complaints critics levy against a program often billed as a hallmark of No Child Left Behind, the federal education reform law signed into effect in 2002 that is ironically touted for claiming accountability as a central piece.

“In theory, it’s a very good idea for our school programs. You name students whose parents can’t afford extra help outside school,” said Niambi Clay, program manager for the Oakland Unified School District (OSUD) supplementary educational services office. “But in terms of implementation, it can be an absolute nightmare.”

Through No Child Left Behind, students who attend schools that have failed to meet adequate yearly progress (AYP) goals for three consecutive years—like Sobrante Park—are eligible for free, private tutoring. Parents pick the provider, and the federal government, through Title I funds, picks up the tab.

The federal government allocated $2.5 billion dollars for schools to contract with tutoring companies this year, the Associated Press reported in April. In the current school year, OUSD, one of the largest districts in California, earmarked approximately $5 million in Title I funds for tutoring.

Typically, Oakland students receive 20 to 60 hours of one-on-one, small group or web-based tutoring a year. Vendors, who must be approved by the state Department of Education, generally administer pre- and post-tests to measure improvement in the area of math or reading or both. The expectation is that tutoring bolsters individual student performance, thereby helping schools to meet their AYP goals.

The school district is charged with informing parents about tutoring options, a lengthy process unto itself that involves communicating with school sites, posting information on the web, holding tutoring fairs and initiating other coordination efforts. Once parents select a provider, a chorus line of bureaucratic legwork ensues. District staff process applications, negotiate agreements and correct errors, like when ineligible students enroll or parents mistakenly sign students up with more than one vendor. To shoulder the workload, OUSD set up a new office with new staff, comprised of a program manager and an administrative assistant, whose salaries are drawn from the reallocation of Title I funds.

Schools are also digging into their own pockets to cover management costs. Jefferson, Oakland’s largest elementary school, uses Higher Ground Neighborhood Development Corp, a non-profit education services group, to manage the school’s 13 providers, of which five operate on-site. Coordinator Amber Blackwell said the nonprofit received $20,000 for the 2005-2006 school year.

Higher Ground also contracts with Sobrante Park, where about a sixth of the student population receives free tutoring. Principal Marco Franco dipped into school site funds to hire a coordinator—at $40,000 a year, he said—because program management grew too burdensome for existing staff. “It’s a terrible logistical monster,” he said.

Given the red tape districts and schools must penetrate, the school year is often well underway before tutoring sessions begin. Sometimes, they commence as late as January or February, Franco said.

A Civil Rights Project study at Harvard University found similar management troubles in 11 large school districts across the country, including the Los Angeles and Fresno unified school districts.

The study underscores one of the program’s additional shortcomings: low participation rates. Between 16 and 20 percent of those eligible actually participate, said Gail Sunderman, who conducted the research, in a phone interview this week.

In Oakland, more than 11,000 students are eligible through the free or reduced lunch program. The district can accommodate 3,380, and about 30 fewer actually use the services, Clay said.

The state average is bleaker. Out of 800,000 eligible students, 98,000, or a little more than a tenth, are served.

Neither Oakland nor the state keeps statistics on the demographics of students who participate. Nonetheless, some say those struggling the most in school aren’t the ones benefiting.

“I think they should make the kids who need it go,” said Jose Garcia, whose son attends an after school reading course at Jefferson. “It’s not right that there are all these services, and they don’t use it.”

Susan Lee, a fifth-grade teacher at Jefferson, said just two of her students are enrolled in free tutoring, though neither is in need. One is already a strong student, and the other suffers from an attention deficit, which is best addressed with behavioral therapists not academic tutors, she said.

The students she would like to see receive tutoring aren’t getting it because parents are too busy to sign their children up or are otherwise uninvolved in school, she said.

In other words, parents don’t know what they’re missing—literally, in fact, since according to Sunderman, “There’s still no research on whether or not (the program) is effective.”

Part of the problem is that states are charged with evaluating tutoring providers, but very few, including California, have done so, she said.

In California, vendors must highlight the effectiveness of their pedagogical methods before the Department of Education (CDE) grants approval for operation in public schools, renewable after two years. Providers are not, however, beholden to specific standards therein, such as small class sizes or hours of service. The state has no system in place for evaluating providers on whether they improve academic performance, and has not removed a single company from the list of state-approved vendors for failing to furnish adequate services, said Jerry Cummings, program consultant for the CDE Title I policy office, which oversees the program.

California is not alone. According to a study by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now and the American Institute for Social Justice, only about a quarter of surveyed states had completed provider performance evaluations in the 2003-2004 school year, and just three said they had taken action against noncompliant vendors. None had evaluated the cost of supplying the services compared with academic improvements.

“This is a particularly disturbing fact, given the amount of money spent on these programs,” the studies’ authors wrote.

Beginning in October, the CDE will require all tutoring companies to submit data on what services they offered for the prior year, how many students they served and figures on academic performance.

That still won’t determine whether the tutoring is worth its salt, though. Many schools offer other forms of intervention, meaning an uptick in test scores could be the product of any number of factors.

At Sobrante Park, site funds are expended on art, music, writing and library facilities. The school has seen a 200-point improvement in academic achievement over five years on a statewide performance index ranging from 200 to 1,000. Franco credits his own programs.

“We’ve grown from internal interventions rather than these (NCLB) programs,” he said, adding later, “It’s not that they’re totally irrelevant, but given the return, it’s just not ideal.”

The occasion was a joint meeting of the commission with the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC), the group formulating a new plan for an expanded city center.

Mandated by the settlement of a city’s lawsuit against the university, DAPAC was created to find a way the city can live with the university’s planned expansion into the downtown. It has been meeting with established city commissions to seek information and policies to incorporate into the new plan.

Bus Rapid Transit

While the agenda ranged across a variety of topics, most of the interest Wednesday focused on the issues of plans for Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), parking and the university’s role in the city’s traffic congestion.

Jim Cunradi, manager of AC Transit’s BRT program, described plans for the system that is planned to run from the downtown BART station in Berkeley, then along Telegraph Avenue into Oakland, and then along International Boulevard to the Bayfair BART Station in San Leandro.

The system would provide for faster, more reliable bus service—shortening travel times and increasing ridership by a combination of dedicated bus lanes, traffic signal controls and a new rapid boarding fare payment system.

If all goes as planned, the system could be up and running in later 2009.

“It’s the best combination of technologies you can do for the bus” and would eliminate about 10,000 car trips a day, he said.

BRT, conceived by officials in Curitiba, Brazil, who couldn’t afford to build a subway system, is catching on around the world, with systems planned or in operation in cities Tehran to Paris and San Francisco, where a BRT route is planned along Van Ness Avenue.

Cunradi said specifics are still under discussion, including the precise routing as it loops through downtown Berkeley—with a hub at the BART plaza.

“I’m in complete agreement,” said Wrenn. “We need BRT.”

Transportation Commission Chair Sarah Syed said ACT transit should expand BRT service to University Avenue to connect with the 72 Rapid line on San Pablo Avenue and perhaps on to the marina, where a ferry terminal is planned. The 72 Rapid service uses the same traffic signal controls planned for the BRT line.

While she said she liked the concept of BRT, DAPAC member Lisa Stephens feared that creation of the dedicated lanes would eliminate some of the street trees on Shattuck—a concerned shared by DAPAC member Linda Jewell.

“I think it will come down to pitting trees against the bus,” Jewell said.

Another concern was the closure of the two-lane stretch of Telegraph south of the university to through traffic, Cunradi said.

Because of their concerns about crime, merchants “want eyes on the street,” he said. The possibility of allowing through traffic after 6 p.m. is one option under consideration.

But Wrenn charged that the university consistently downplays the positive effects of programs designed to encourage mass transit use “to make it look like transportation incentives do no good.”

McDougall acknowledged that on any given weekday, about 4,100 university employee and student cars are parked on city streets or in private or city garages and lots.

The university is now planning to add 2,300 spaces in its Long Range Development Plan for 2020. That number would be cut by 500 if BRT is implemented by 2010, she said.

Jesse Arreguin, a transportation commissioner and a student, said the existing Class Pass and Bear Pass programs were deplorably inadequate.

“The University of California needs to be a leader in alternative transportation,” he said.

One solution would be to raise campus parking rates, using the funds to bankroll transit programs. New building programs should also include funds to provide traffic mitigations, he said.

“The whole network of bus service for downtown and the university needs to be upgraded,” said Transportation Commissioner Nathan Landau.

Parking, other issues

According to the experts, the solution to everyone’s favorite gripe, downtown parking, is to build less of it, while increasing population density.

John Holtzclaw, chair of the Sierra Club Transportation Committee, cited figures showing that residents of dense urban neighborhoods use their cars far less that residents of “urban sprawl” suburbs such as San Ramon.

“I recommend higher density housing,” he said, citing the Gaia Building as a good example.

“Don’t be afraid of narrowing streets and widening sidewalks,” he said.

The public will be able to join in the planning process during a special Downtown Visioning Workshop from 1 to 4 p.m. on Saturday, June 17, at the Berkeley High School Library, near the corner of Allston Way and Milvia Street.

It’s official: a renewed parcel tax to support Berkeley’s public schools will go before voters this November.

On Wednesday, the Berkeley Board of Education unanimously approved language for a measure that will renew two existing parcel taxes, the Berkeley Schools Excellence Project (BSEP) and the bridge Measure B of 2004, set to sunset in 2007.

The new measure, BSEP of 2006, maintains the current tax rate, and is expected to supply the district with about $19.6 million a year for 10 years. The tax will primarily fund small class sizes, music and visual and performing arts, school libraries and professional development.

Board directors must finalize the approved language by passing a resolution at the June 21 board meeting.

If passed, about two-thirds of the funding, or $12.7 million, will go toward maintaining small student to teacher ratios: 19:1 for kindergarten through third grade, 26:1 for grades four and five; and 27.5:1 for the remaining grades, save B-Tech, where the ratio would be 18:1.

A quarter of the funds will support music and visual and performing arts, libraries, parent outreach and school site coffers. The remaining budget will fund professional development and implementation, including the cost of staffing a public information officer and others.

The tax would be levied per square-foot on private and commercial properties. Low-income seniors qualify for an exemption.

Directors heralded the measure as a compromise.

“No one individual, no one group, no one organization gets everything they want in this measure,” said Director John Selawsky. “But if you look at it in its entirety, everyone gets something. I think we need a little perspective here.”

Elementary school and middle school students spoke at Wednesday’s meeting in support of the measure, as did a handful of adults, including school board candidate Karen Hemphill:

“I am very pleased and happy that the board is going ahead with approving the tax measure for the Berkeley Unified School District,” she said. “Adequate funding is absolutely necessary (for school programs), and this is a good step in that direction.”

The language of the ballot initiative did not go uncontested, however. The president of the Berkeley Federation of Teachers (BFT), the union representing 700 teachers, counselors, librarians and others, criticized the measure for expressing small class sizes in terms of “goals” rather than solid figures and for not placing a cap on fiscal emergencies.

“It is our opinion that compared to the current BSEP, the district has proposed language that loosens—and not tightens up—accountability,” said Barry Fike.

Directors acknowledged the criticism, but said Wednesday that flexible language serves as a safeguard against future unknowns.

The board will maintain its commitment to class sizes unless there is a severe fiscal crisis, said Director Nancy Riddle, who is up for reelection in November.

Director Shirley Issel, who will also vie to maintain her seat on school board this fall, concurred. “You’re going to have to trust us,” she said.

Yolanda Huang, a former BUSD parent and organizer of Berkeleyans Endorse School Management Accessibility, Accountability, Responsiveness and Transparency (BeSMaart), doesn’t buy it. The district has asked for the public’s trust in the past and has not upheld its end of the bargain, she said, citing poor management and planning of school maintenance operations.

“I want to spend this money on kids,” she said. “I just want to make sure the kids benefit and it isn’t diddled away on administrators.”

A poll conducted in March found that among 600 potential voters more than 75 percent would support the tax. The measure needs a two-thirds majority to pass.

On Tuesday, Bay Area voters approved eight of 12 tax measures to support public schools, including $435 million in bond money for Oakland Unified School District facilities, the largest bond ever passed for Oakland schools.

The California Health Facilities Financing Authority announced last week that Berkeley’s LifeLong Medical Care clinics will receive a $408,374 grant and the Berkeley Free Clinic will receive $35,264 out of the $40 million grant money issued statewide.

According to LifeLong Medical Care acting CEO Melissa Schoen, the grant will be used for critical facility and information technology upgrades and replacement of outdated medical and dental equipment in four of LifeLong’s health clinics: West Berkeley Family Practice, Berkeley Primary Care, the Downtown Oakland Clinic, and LifeLong Dental Clinic.

“For 30 years, LifeLong has provided high quality health and social services to underserved people of all ages,” Schoen said. “These grants will enable us to continue to care for those who are low income and without health insurance, and work to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in health and health care.”

A major provider of medical services to the uninsured and to those with complex health needs in the East Bay, LifeLong provided approximately 101,000 primary care visits to nearly 17,000 people, among whom nearly half were uninsured, in 2005.

Schoen added that regular care prevented debilitating consequences that are costly to the patient and to California’s health care system. “Each time a patient chooses to use our primary care services rather than hospital emergency rooms, everyone benefits,” she said.

Dr. Shirley Livingston of Lifelong Dental Clinic said that a lot of equipment at the clinic was archaic and breaking down which interfered with patient care.

“Most of our patients, who come from financially underprivileged sections of society, are in a catch-22 situation,” she said. “Since we function on a very tight budget we have to make the most of grants like this, which are few and far between. This will help us to get new hand pieces and dental chairs, as well as lighting structures which we immediately need.”

Julie Sinai, senior aide for Mayor Tom Bates, called the clinics in the city a “safety net for the lower income and the under-served” and said that it was extremely important and valuable for the city that the grants had been awarded to these four clinics.

When Berkeley Art Center Director Robbin Henderson came to the City Council, beret in hand, asking councilmembers to restore funding slashed three years ago, the unanimous body moved the question to the growing list of projects to be considered when the council puts together its final budget this month or next.

The 19-year-old center, that Councilmember Linda Maio calls “a gem of an arts institution,” is located in a small building beside Codornices Creek in North Berkeley’s Live Oak Park. Its programs are intended, for the most part, for a local audience, and it is an art gallery as well as a venue for spoken word and music.

The center was founded in 1967 as a city program, staffed by city employees. But when Proposition 13 hit, a number of city programs were cut, including the arts center. “They closed and locked the building,” Henderson said.

But within a year, a group emerged that would create the nonprofit which now runs the center. Henderson worked there from 1979-1984 and again from 1991 to the present.

The center survives on small contracts from the city to work with youth, hold film festivals, educational events, exhibitions and more. The city funds one-fourth to one-third of the center’s costs. The rest comes from grants and contracts.

“Almost everything is free except the concerts,” Henderson said. The center is asking the city for $20,000, which will bring city funding up to the rate at which it funded the center several years ago. While expenses are growing, other grant funds are dwindling, Henderson said.

Current exhibits include designs in kelp by local artist Lucy Traber.

“Traber has been working with kelp for over forty years. Her work, Kelp: Pods & Vessels, combines a feeling of prehistory with contemporary art forms,” says a note on the center’s website, www.berkeleyartcenter.org.

A plan to put a $50-per-homeowner levy on the November ballot to upgrade the Berkeley’s 100-year-old storm drain system is water under the bridge, at least for now, says Councilmember Linda Maio.

After meeting Wednesday morning with creeks and good government advocates, Maio said she’s convinced that “what we need is a much larger watershed plan and to build education around that plan.”

Maio originally intended to ask the City Council next week to put a measure on the November ballot asking voters to approve new taxes to upgrade the city’s sometimes failing system of storm drains, pipes and culverts.

After meeting with the group that included representatives from the League of Women Voters, Friends of Five Creeks and others, Maio decided to put the tax measure on hold for two years, giving her time to broaden and refine her concept.

The goal of the more comprehensive measure will be not only to upgrade the infrastructure, but to filter storm water through the soil, reducing the volume as it hits the storm drain system—and when it does go into the system, it will be much cleaner.

“In the end, we can do the job better and easier,” said Susan Schwartz of Friends of Five Creeks, among those meeting with Maio. “It’s a long-term fix to allow water to soak into the soil rather than filling the culverts and flooding west Berkeley.”

Responsibility for better watershed management falls both to the homeowner and the city, Maio said, noting that homeowners should use permeable surfaces when building driveways or patios.

In fact, at the Tuesday council meeting, she will introduce a resolution requiring that new and replacement driveways and parking spaces be made of permeable materials.

Developers can reduce runoff into the storm water system by creating “green roofs,” where water is filtered through planters before going into the soil, Schwartz noted.

It also may be possible, Schwartz said, for the city to build planted, below street level traffic circles and street medians that would catch rain runoff from the streets and filter it through the soil, before it gets to the storm water system.

And Maio said she wants the city to explore using porous material to pave streets and sidewalks.

Creative watershed projects are not waiting for Maio’s 2008 ballot measure. Friends of Five Creeks and the nonprofit Save the Bay are working on plans to open up Schoolhouse Creek where it emerges from a pipe at the foot of Gilman Street and runs into the Bay.

At high tide the drainpipe is submerged and causes backup and flooding in West Berkeley. The project to daylight the mouth of the creek and create a salt marsh that would filter the water as it enters the Bay would be funded by state bond money, Schwartz said.

With the defeat of the library bond measure on Tuesday’s ballot, there will be no expansion at the West Berkeley Library. There will be no new space for computers or for kids to sit and read, no new room for the literacy program and its tutors, according to library officials.

Opinion

Editorials

Have you ever had the feeling you’re sitting up on a hill observing two high-speed trains headed towards one another on intersecting tracks, with a collision all but inevitable? That’s the picture we’re getting of the ongoing interaction between Berkeleyans eager to preserve the city’s historic buildings and those who’d like to tear some of them down in order to make way for “progress,” variously defined as mall-type chain stores, lots of condos downtown, big new hotels or lebensraum for UC expansion.

The chain store romance started during the reign of Mayor Shirley Dean. At least two potentially charming downtown store buildings were remodeled to suit the taste of corporate clients, both now long gone. Gateway Computers pulled out of Berkeley and of retail altogether. Edy’s ice cream parlor, the kind of attractive longstanding downtown business that today’s planners can only wish for, was essentially demolished by a scandalous building process that amounted to fraud on the city’s inspection procedures, to be replaced by a flash-in-the-pan dismally unsuccessful outpost of the Eddie Bauer corporate empire. It stands empty today.

The Big Ugly Box movement, which is just now transitioning from faux rentals to the much-more-profitable condo phase, was kicked off by the Gaia Building, whose investors have made millions from the extra floors generated by developer Patrick Kennedy’s promises, promises for space devoted to cultural pursuits—promises which have been broken again and again. Gaia took the place of an old dairy building, one of Berkeley’s oldest, which would have been an ideal spot for the kind of restoration and re-use that make towns like Monterey tourist attractions. Another Kennedy coup was demolishing the University Avenue Victorian home of one of Berkeley’s founders.

Starting in the Dean period, now-gone City Manager James Keene took aim at the city’s 25-year-old Landmarks Preservation Ordinance. He and his allies in the Planning Department and city attorney’s office used the excuse of an easily fixed minor inconsistency between the ordinance and the state’s permit streamlining act to generate a draft of a complete re-write intended to make it much easier to demolish historic buildings. The Landmarks Preservation Commission (I was a member for seven years) worked hard to produce an acceptable compromise, but just as it was finished the composition of the City Council changed and it was never enacted.

When Mayor Tom Bates and Councilmember Laurie Capitelli took office with the financial backing of development interests, they elevated previous skirmishes to a full-bore war on historic buildings. Bates’s much-touted Task Force on Permitting and Development had few other significant outcomes, but it did eventually lead to another draft of a new landmarks ordinance which was even worse than those which preceded it.

At a public hearing, more than 40 citizens spoke against his draft, while only four people, all allied with building interests in some way, spoke for it. But Bates and his allies on the council are seldom deterred by public opinion. Livable Berkeley, a development-lobby front which might have been named by George Orwell, has made its wishes known in letters and at behind-closed-doors meetings with the mayor and councilmembers. It now appears that they’ll get what they want, and soon.

Some community members who support historic preservation have been predicting this outcome for months. They’ve now successfully circulated petitions for an initiative measure which will submit the existing LPO, which has served Berkeley well for many years, plus the few small changes necessary to conform to new state law, to the voters for approval in November. If the initiative wins, it will place the ordinance out of reach of politicians, which might be a good idea.

But the “official” historic resource supporters at Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association haven’t yet taken a position on the initiative, probably because some board members are worried that megabucks from developers will be dumped into the campaign against it. There are no limits on campaign contributions for initiatives, as there are for candidates. Patrick Kennedy’s Sacramento mother-in-law, for example, contributed $5,000 to the campaign which defeated a height limitation initiative a few years ago, a purchased victory which is now cited as Berkeley’s endorsement for ever-taller buildings. If the LPO enactment is defeated in November because citizen supporters are outspent, it might be spun as a vote against preservation.

A Livable Berkeley stalwart sent out an e-mail last week, widely copied around the Internet, which predicted that “…there will be an active campaign committee established to defeat the initiative, which will …work as a political wedge issue, in the words of one non-mayoral politico ‘separating the rational NIMBYs from the paranoid NIMBYs’ (and requiring Zelda to embed with the paranoids)… I will probably work actively for that campaign, which will succeed. Developers will line up to contribute….”

The double-talk lexicon of flaks for the building industry is hard to parse sometimes. Do we believe that Tom Bates really wants to run for office as the Anti-Preservationist, or that opponent Zelda Bronstein wants to run as a “paranoid NIMBY”? It’s not clear just what a “rational NIMBY” might be, or why such a person would vote for the candidate opposed to preservation of historic resources. Even paranoids have enemies, of course, and sometimes they’re the same enemies as those of their more rational associates. But if the Bates-controlled City Council really does pass the latest bad draft of the emasculated LPO, or an even worse one rumored to be in the works, it will at least give voters of all stripes who believe that re-using our historic buildings is sound public policy some clear choices in November.

Following Thursday’s vote, an angry Carson said, “I’ve been consistent [in voting against electronic voting machines]. I haven’t bullshitted people like some people are bullshitting here today.”

Carson left the supervisors immediately after the vote on the contract to go into closed session, and was not available to comment on who he was directing his “bullshitting” comment to.

However, they seemed to be a direct reference to Supervisor Gail Steele, who, along with Carson, voted last March against entering contract negotiations with both Diebold and Sequoia.

While Miley voted to approve the contract negotiations last March, both he and Haggerty indicated that they were doing so only to keep the county’s options open for the November election, and both said they reserved the right to vote for or against the actual proposed contract when it came before them.

The county expects to be reimbursed by the federal government for $8.7 million of the purchase under the Help America Vote Act, with another $3 million coming from Diebold for a buyback of the electronic voting machines that were purchased from the company and have been in use in Alameda County for the past several elections.

Berkeley attorney Lowell Finley of Voter Action organization said prior to the supervisors’ vote that if the supervisors approved the Sequoia contract, his organization would file a lawsuit in state court to block their implementation.

Last March, Voter Action filed a state lawsuit against Alameda County and other California counties to block the implementation of the Diebold electronic touchscreen voting systems. That lawsuit has yet to be heard.

Shortly before the supervisors vote, Supervisor Steele downplayed the lawsuit threat, saying that “there’s going to be a lawsuit from somebody, no matter what we do.”

In approving the contract, supervisors upheld the staff recommendation to purchase the Sequoia machines, but ignored a crowd of public speakers asking the county to reject both Sequoia and Diebold.

Under the new contract, voting in Alameda County for the next three years will be similar to what occurred in last Tuesday’s election, with most voters marking paper ballots to be counted by electronic scanners, and disabled voters having access to electronic touch screen voting machines.

The difference this November will be that the scanners and voting machines will be provided by Sequoia instead of Diebold, and scanners will be available in each precinct. Under the new system, voters themselves will insert their paper ballots into the scanners. In Tuesday’s election, the ballots were not counted at the precincts, but at a central location in Oakland.

While the new Sequoia voting system will not be capable of conducting Instant Runoff Voting in time for the November elections, when the City of Berkeley will be electing Councilmembers, School Board members, and the mayor, the contract calls for the machines to be upgraded to IRV capability by the end of next year.

In addition to the recommended contract, supervisors approved two additions of their own: an amendment by Lai-Bitker that staff conduct its own independent security testing of the Sequoia machines, and an amendment by Haggerty that the county registrar of voters office conduct a “100 percent manual count” of the votes cast on touchscreen voting machines in November’s election to make sure that the electronic count given by the machines is accurate.

Lai-Bitker said she wanted the independent testing because “even though I have been convinced by county staff that the security for the Sequoia machines is adequate, we need to have our own testing so that the public will be assured that the vote count will be accurate.”

Immediately before the vote to approve the Sequoia contract, supervisors rejected on a 2-3 vote a substitute motion by Miley to enter contract negotiations with ES&S voting systems’ AutoMARK machines. These machines—which would have been provided primarily for disabled voters—allow voters to use a touchscreen to mark their ballots.

Unlike the Sequoia and Diebold touchscreen systems, the ES&S AutoMARK machines print out a marked paper ballot when the voter is finished, allowing for a separate counting process from the machine on which the ballots are marked. Miley and Carson voted for the AutoMARK contract, and Haggerty, Lai-Bitker, and Steele voted against it.

A crowd of voting activists spoke during the public comment period prior to the board vote, with speakers divided between those urging supervisors to adopt the AutoMARK system and those urging a return to hand-counted ballots. The only speakers in favor of either the Sequoia or Diebold contracts were representatives of those two companies.

The Diebold touchscreen machines became obsolete when the State of California passed a law requiring a verifiable paper trail on all electronic voting machines beginning in January of 2006. The Diebold machines previously used by Alameda County do not possess a verifiable paper trail.

A Diebold spokesperson said Thursday that there was a possibility that the Alameda County Diebold machines could be modified to include verifiable paper trail capability, but not in time for the November election.

Public Comment

The dismissal of Jackie Griffin as Director of the Berkeley Public Library was good news indeed. It is unfortunate that it could not have come before so much damage had already been done to our library. Many excellent staff members who left the library rather than continue to serve with Griffin as director will not be persuaded to come back to their former jobs; we cannot get the thousands of books that she ordered thrown into dumpsters returned, nor can we get our money back from the installation of the RFID system, but we can hope that our library will be returned to a more humanized, community friendly institution, with a staff that is not being punished for trying to do a good job.

Some suggestions for the revitalized library:

Griffin may not have abused her dual role as library director and secretary to the Board of Library Trustees, but in future, to avoid even the possibility of inappropriate bias, the library director should not also be the board secretary. The position of secretary should be held by a person not otherwise connected to the library.

E-mail and U.S. mail to the board should not have to be addressed care of (and therefore filtered though) the library director, but should be sent to individual directors or to a dedicated address. The board must function as a completely separate entity.

The purpose of the Board of Library Trustees is not to back up the director’s decisions, but to oversee the director’s administration. In the past, the board has seemed to favor the director’s opinions and desires over the positions of both the public and library staff, and the board must bear at least part of the responsibility for the disastrous impact of Griffin’s years at Berkeley Public Library. She should have been supervised more carefully and judiciously.

Shirley Stuart

•

MONEY

Editors, Daily Planet:

The people of Berkeley seem to have no idea where money comes from. The only way to “Save Cody’s” would have been to provide easy parking near Telegraph, get rid of the runaways, and stop making it so generally difficult to do business in Berkeley. But too late for Cody’s.

Now, West Berkeley Bowl is threatened by death from a thousand cuts, as the Berkeley political system seeks to micromanage every detail in search of the way life ought to be. The car dealers are ready to up and bolt.

Other cities are busy attracting business. Charitably, it might be said the Berkeley is struggling to hang on to existing business. More realistically, Berkeley is chasing business away. The result: costs go up, revenues can’t keep up, city services decline.

The city had better rethink its business development strategies—because voters aren’t going to support new property or parcel taxes for the City of Berkeley. No way.

Tom Case

•

TELEGRAPH AVENUE

Editors, Daily Planet:

I was impressed by the meeting called by Councilmember Kriss Worthington to discuss the future of Telegraph Avenue. The room was packed by a cross section of Telegraph players. Store owners, vendors, residents, students, People’s Park activists, advocates for the homeless, members of the religious community, to name a few. It was refreshing to see people really take a hard look at Telegraph’s woes and not just blame them on the homeless and young people. I was a little disappointed by the city’s proposal. For years now, every time there is a little dip in retail sales on the Avenue the city’s response has been to throw more cops at the problem and paint something. The last thing we need now is more cops on Telegraph.

What we do need is to fix up the triangle at the intersection of Dwight and Telegraph. This is the gateway our storied section of Telegraph and it looks like some ghetto back alley. I’d love to see some kiosks that tell the story and history of Telegraph, some beautiful plants and flowers and a gourmet coffee stand. I’ve been asking for a permit for such a stand for years only to be met with profound silence. After Thursday’s meeting I was approached by merchants who asked if I would be interested in putting together more shows in People’s Park to draw more people up to the Ave. I think it would be great to get back into putting shows together and think it would be a good idea to establish a Telegraph event committee that not only puts together People’s Park shows but also brings in great street performers. Thursday’s meeting not only made me more hopeful that the ills of Telegraph can be corrected but that we can make Telegraph better and more prosperous than it has ever been. And all this can be done while respecting the rights and dignity of everyone whether young or old, rich or poor.

Thursday night was a good start. Let’s keep the ball rolling.

Dan McMullan

Disabled People Outside Project

•

ANARCHY AND IMPERIALISM

Editors, Daily Planet:

Anarchists are all too familiar with the smug titters of authoritarians, who are too obtuse to conceive of any kind of organization created by anarchists. But to impute the situation of increasing disorder and escalating bloodshed in Iraq, as editorial cartoonist De Freitas has done, either to the political philosophy of anarchism or to those who identify themselves as anarchists is an offense beyond insult. Regardless of what one may think of the strategies of the various armed factions jockeying for power in the situation of political instability created by the U.S./UK invasion and occupation (should we then characterize these imperialist powers as anarchist?), it is obvious that none of them is proposing international anti-state anti-hierarchical federations of working class people. Indeed, if we are to believe the mainstream reports, the insurgents who are vying for state power in Iraq are driven by religious sectarianism and/or ethnic chauvinism—not by a desire to abolish the state and capitalism. To equate the universally recognized symbol of anarchism (the circle-A) with the chaos and horror of imperialist occupation and/or civil war is the height of bad faith and monumental ignorance.

C. Boles

•

EDUCATION

Editors, Daily Planet:

I am a retired teacher employed in a No Child Left Behind after school tutorial program run by the non-profit Art, Research, and Curriculum (ARC) Associates.

On Wednesday, June 7, staff members from ARC met to plan ways we could improve on the success of our current reading and math programs. What we did not discuss was the possibility that we may or may not get paid for our time and expertise.

I am proud to be a part of a program where children come first and not a program where the business model means that children are secondary to greed and profit.

Nancy Kron

Kensington

•

TRANSPORTATION

Editors, Daily Planet:

I’ve been reading all the letters in the Tuesday Planet “transportation issue”—about Ashby BART, Brower Center, Telegraph Avenue and the BRT. I think this literature shows a degree of disconnect from reality, similar to that exhibited by Republicans with regard to global warming.

We in Berkeley need to connect with the reality that we’re too dependent on the automobile. We can’t have unlimited parking, accommodating an unlimited number of cars. Our cars are ruining our local environment, and in the process, directly contributing to a global climate disaster. We can see all the cars clogging the streets, waiting impatiently at traffic lights, filling the on-street parking spaces, lined up to drink more $3/gallon gas. But these scenes don’t seem to trigger alarm bells like disappearing glaciers, drowning island nations and swirling hurricanes, all of which can be seen in the movie An Inconvenient Truth. There’s a big graph showing the increase in carbon dioxide and temperature. Would we wake up if we saw a graph of the increase in cars, parking or congestion?

Today I took the No. 9 bus to the marina. While I was there, I checked the toes of the Guardian. They are still above water, but I was impressed with how few feet it is from the toes to the waves. I had a vision of the fishing pier awash.

I bought the book that goes with the movie. I’m considering sending a copy of An Inconvenient Truth to George Bush. I could send a copy of Donald Shoup’s “The High Cost of Free Parking” to Michael Katz, or one of the other Berkeley people who think we’ve got to have ever more parking. Berkeley “ratified” Kyoto, but a lot of our fine environmentalists are unwilling to give a lane to the BRT, or reduce the number of downtown parking spaces. They think local business will die if we don’t provide parking for all the cars that come. This is just as ideologically blind as Bush’s refusal to deal with global warming.

OK, time to stop being negative. Here are some positive things we can do:

1. Put a high price on downtown parking; use the revenue to improve the downtown environment (Don Shoup’s idea).

4. Set a maximum on the number of parking spaces downtown; make transit free downtown in “fareless square.” (Portland OR’s idea)

5. Put in a bus-only lane for the BRT; shift drivers to bus-riding (AC Transit’s idea, and maybe UCB’s idea?)

6. Implement a local package delivery service for stores on Telegraph, Shattuck and University (my idea).

Steve Geller

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PRE-SCHOOL

Editors, Daily Planet:

I hear there is a proposal to require credentialing for pre-school caregivers. I know we all believe in credentialing, but we need to know what skills are most important for pre-school caregivers. The most important skill is sensitivity to the unspoken needs of a child.

The second most important skill is the heart to give a child open attention even when the caregiver is stressed or worn out. The desire to reach out to the community for support is another important skill. Along with these skills, the pre-school caregiver certainly needs to know the developmental stages of the child and tested techniques for providing children challenges and opportunities. But the ability to make a child feel secure is essential. Pre-school caregivers should be selected not only on the basis of their credentials but also for their capacity for nourishing human relations.

Romila Khanna

Albany

•

THE FIELD MANUAL

Editors, Daily Planet:

Does the field manual for high-ranking military officers require that they disconnect themselves from tragedy? Rear Admiral Harry Harris was asked about the deaths by hanging of “enemy combatants” detained for over four years at Guantanamo detention center in Cuba and blamed the victims. “They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own,” he said. Speaking of no regard for human life reminds me of the two dozen civilians killed by Marines in Haditha, Iraq, last November.

Does the field manual also supply the new locution that enabled Admiral Harris to create his own reality? “I believe,” he said, “this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us.” Wonder of wonders! Two Saudis and one Yemeni, in total isolation for over four years, used fabricated nooses to commit war against their jailers. I can’t help but wonder why Patrick Henry, instead of talking about it, did not commit asymmetric warfare against the British over two centuries ago when he so eloquently pledged his liberty more dear than his death.

I have a particular fondness for the Berkeley Bowl. I fought the chair of the Zoning Adjustments Board and the mayor when they tried to approve a MacFrugal’s Bargain Closeouts at the Bowl’s current Oregon site a decade ago. The neighborhood, reeling from the closing of their Safeway, begged the city not to allow anything but a grocery store. Staff responded by commissioning a $25,000 report that “proved” no grocery store would ever be profitable there!

In the end the city sided with the neighbors, and as a result the Bowl is what and where it is today. Now the Bowl wants to open up in West Berkeley, and again the local neighborhood is excited at the prospect, and again I’m hoping to see it happen. But now that the Bowl is a Bay Area powerhouse, I’m also hoping we’re not about to help it expand at the cost of our ability to navigate our overburdened streets and our commitment to fair-labor practices.

The streets

When a project as sizable as the Bowl is proposed, California law requires us to evaluate its effect on the environment, especially on traffic. The Bowl’s nearest major streets are Berkeley’s only state highways, Ashby and San Pablo. The environmental impact report (EIR) says that that intersection, already the city’s most congested, will be greatly harmed by the Bowl, and also claims that nothing we can do will fully undo the damage. To make matters worse, the analysis leading to that conclusion is based on far-from-credible assumptions that dramatically underestimate the effect.

In evaluating the new site’s traffic impacts, Fehr & Peers, the EIR traffic consultants, used the standard industry average for American supermarkets, dismissing the Bowl’s obvious high patronage. And when asked to explain why they found zero increased regional draw from opening a new Bowl just four blocks from Highway 80, their representative said that no regional traffic would want to take the freeway because it was too crowded. When cornered in public testimony, he repeatedly fell back on the argument that, with 5,000 to 10,000 homes within a mile and a half of the project, the new Bowl would not need regional traffic to sustain it. But the question their analysis was supposed to be answering was how much traffic the Bowl would generate, not how much patronage it would need to turn a profit.

The artificially low numbers not only distorted the analysis of what will happen to the already miserable San Pablo–Ashby intersection, but also fed into a distorted analysis of the parking spaces needed to prevent the Bowl parking from overflowing onto neighborhood streets. That number was already reduced by taking at face value the owner’s improbable claim that the new Bowl will have fewer employees than the existing store, even though at twice the size it will be the largest supermarket in the Bay Area.

The workplace

Now I have to turn to an unpleasant topic that all Berkeleyans who like me love the Bowl must face up to: the Bowl is not a pro-union business.

Four years ago, when the union struggle at the Bowl played out, I thought—as I suspect most of us thought—that the unionization of the Bowl’s workforce meant its labor issues were resolved. Far from it. Glen Yasuda, the Bowl’s owner, fought the union so hard that the NLRB cited him for unfair practices and issued an order forcing him to negotiate a contract in good faith or face sanctions. The eventual contract contained no provision for the unionization of the new store. Mr. Yasuda’s representative Dan Kataoka, when asked if he’d allow a “card check” election to let a clear majority of the new workers establish their right to join a union, labeled that fundamental democratic practice undemocratic and refused, setting the stage for another protracted and uncertain struggle at the new Bowl.

If it remains non-union, Mr. Yasuda will have a strong incentive to close the old unionized store and retain the new non-union one, creating profound ramifications for Berkeley traffic. When asked why he didn’t evaluate that circumstance, the traffic consultant called it “speculative” because Mr. Yasuda told him he has no intention of closing the existing store. (As if it’s speculative to assume that a businessman who wants to build a much bigger establishment just two miles away might be building a replacement instead of an expansion. That’s what has happened to Cody’s, which got the identical kind of gift for their Fourth Street expansion.) The city’s zoning director then jumped in to volunteer that he thought that if the old Bowl were to close, it would have no effect on traffic to the new site, dismissing with a wave of his hand the question that should have necessitated a whole new section of the EIR.

And add to the list of worries the possibility that Mr. Yasuda could accept his $10 million rezoning gift, then turn around and sell the site to a similar company of his choice. That might be Whole Foods, which at least would serve the neighborhood, but also—dare I utter the word—WalMart. Right now, there’s nothing in the permit or proposed zoning revision to prevent that.

The City Council meets on the project tonight (Tuesday). The gift they are holding out to Mr. Yasuda is large. In exchange he should be required to truly address the traffic problems the new Bowl will create, maintain the viability of local business, ensure that the supermarket we’re changing our zoning for is the one we’re going to get, and deal with all Bowl employees fairly. Every issue can’t be resolved tonight, but this project, which will have greater impact on the lives of Berkeley citizens than any project that’s come before any of our Councilmembers, rates better than the wishful neglect it’s met with so far.

Well let’s stand up and cheer! The Berkeley Bowl maybe withdrawing it’s application to build a new store in West Berkeley. No fresh organic produce, no great prices, no community meeting rooms, no food court, no quality shopping for West Berkeley.

Gosh, now we will have preserved a wonderful derelict, trash strewn lot for future generations. What more could we ask for?

Who do we have to thank? The Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB), who imposed an additional $1.8 million traffic “mitigation fee” on the owners of the Bowl for possible but undefined traffic impacts. (This is already beyond significant dollars committed as part of current in traffic mitigations the Berkeley Bowl has already agreed to).

Yes, let’s cheer at imposing all the costs of change (and new costs we can invent) on to someone willing to take a risk and make the significant investment to open a store in this area. Remember, the Berkeley Bowl is a business built up over 30 years of hard work by a great hard working local Japanese family and they are willing to take this bold step to open a second store, making the improvements, putting in the buildings and attempting to make this all profitable. Oh if this were to happen, the City of Berkeley gets the property tax revenue and sales tax receipts—but we don’t need that, do we?

Oh, special thanks to those who kept fighting—the inflated fears of the French school, Ecole Biligue and their kids—gosh, do they live in that neighborhood or even walk to school?—no, Zelda Bronstein our esteemed candidate for mayor, who’s been continually fighting this project and also fought the La Farine Bakery on Solano Avenue (and lost)—does she live in this neighborhood?—oh, a no.

The struggling artisans and industrial works fighting to protect jobs—who’s jobs, what jobs? oh, not the jobs created by the Berkeley Bowl—sorry that’s not going to happen.

And special thanks to the owners of Urban Ore, the City of Berkeley subsidized business that has put up the good fight to keep their business operating with a positive cash flow from your taxes and who has continually opposed the Berkeley Bowl locating in West Berkeley.

Lastly, thanks to all the folks who are afraid of anything new in Berkeley no mater who it may benefit as long is it’s not going to affect them.

I’m one of many voters, residents and property owners in West Berkeley extremely upset at the Berkeley Bowl withdrawing it’s application for a permit to build at the new West Berkeley Bowl site on Heinz near Ashby. This is an enormous blow to Berkeley and in particular West Berkeley residents who have no place of any significance to shop. It also gives the impression this City allows a handful of people (some of which do not live in West Berkeley) with money, time, influence and a personal agenda to stall, restrict and impose additional costs on such a fantastic project from a true Berkeley pioneer, benefiting thousands of West Berkeley residents and, that any other city would welcome with open arms.

Berkeley should be proud we have examined, commented, dissected, reexamined and treated this project to the most unbelievable scrutiny over two and a half years. It makes you really question the value and purpose of our approval process. What are the roles of the commissioners? Are they not to look out for what’s good for the city and the citizens of this city—as a whole, not one person’s particular gripe or unsubstantiated fear no matter how irrational it is?

I feel that leadership and action are necessary to benefit the citizens who are direly in need of a quality grocery store in the West Berkeley area.

If you agree please e-mail the mayor or your council representative with your comments. It may not be too late.

I thought I’d never encounter another community as gleefully contentious on an endless cornucopia of issues as the City of Berkeley.

I was wrong.

Town v. Gown’s got nothing on Breast v. Bottle. And who knew that how you put your baby to sleep was an unabashed declaration of politics, parenting philosophy, outlook on life, mettle, and presence or absence of soul?

“Attachment Parenting (AP)” = respond respond respond to baby’s crying ‘til you’re blue in the face, even if it doesn’t stop him or her from crying. “Cry It Out (CIO)” = Close the nursery door and let ‘em cry ‘til they drop.

Tom Bates? Attachment Parenting. Shirley Dean? Cry It Out for sure.

And naturally, the parenting world has its own library of private-cliquesque acronyms—AP, CIO, SAHM (Stay At Home Mom), WM (Working Mom), DS/DD/DH (Darling Daughter/Son/Husband), BF (breastfeeding). Just to keep outsiders in their place, lonely and clueless outside our kingdom of wisdom—like all acronyms!

When my husband and I had our first baby (and probably Only—er, another rabid debate, don’t get me started) five and a half months ago, we little dreamed we were entering a tribal war zone. But war zone it is—of vision, philosophy, words, and purchase choices.

In fact, the World of Parenting lines up pretty closely with the People’s Republic of Berkeley:

And the militant moms and pushy poppas are just as passionate about their views—and smug about the wrongness of others—as the creek savers, People’s Park protectors, and pro-business bullies. Breastinistas preach at formula feeders. SAHMoms bewail the cruelty of WMoms. CIO practitioners shake their heads at AP ‘coddling’.

So just as Berkeley’s civil wars let Telegraph Avenue and South Berkeley deteriorate and cars without parking spaces engulf the city, so it is in the parenting world—as parents fire one-liners at each other in the Craigslist parenting forum and trash the sincerely thought-through choices of other parents, all the while we have no paid maternity leave, no universal health care for children, and a bill authorizing pre-school for all four-year olds takes a nose dive.

Can’t we all just get along??

Say it with me, people: Unity! United we stand—or divided we will fall... and bicker... and choke on our breastmilk lattes in Styrofoam bottles being couriered through car-clogged Berkeley streets by diaper-wearing homeless cyclists...

Huh???

Exactly.

Sonja Fitz is a BFing WM who sometimes SAH and always lets her DH CIO.

The Berkeley Daily Planet published an article about the administrative problems at the Berkeley YMCA, noting that I had been expelled for writing a series of memos about problems there. The article noted efforts on the part of the Y administration to disrupt efforts to unionize workers. This alone, characterizes the administration at the Berkeley Y, and should give the City of Berkeley concern about supporting this organization.

My expulsion from the Berkeley Y represents a shameless attempt by the Y to avoid addressing many safety, hygiene, liability issues. I had expressed these concerns in a series of memos to Director Peter Chong and Aquatics Director Aaron Dence. They never offered any substantive reply, and responded by trying to defame me.

My background as a Certified Pool Operator and competitive swimmer has given me the benefit of seeing how pools can operate safely and successfully. I found myself sending many memos to Dence about breaches of safety and etiquette in the lap pool, and never receiving a reply. But he continued to solicit my input in a patronizing manner.

Chong relied on a series of false incident reports to depict me as anti-social and revoke my membership. In fact, the incident reports used to discredit me were solicited by Y administrators. This has been confirmed by Y staff members, who want to keep their jobs, but who don’t enjoy formal whistleblower protections.

I submitted no less than three written complaints to the Y about the threatening nature of gay men harassing non-gay men in the shower area. The Y ignored these memos, and depicted me as anti-gay. Expressing my objection to unwanted sexual advances in the men’s locker room does not make me anti-gay. Yelling at a child who has done something threatening or frightening doesn’t make me a threat to children.

Last year, I raised over $1,300 for the Berkeley Y’s Annual Fund Drive. As a professional fundraiser with management training, I gave sales meetings, and a lot of counsel to other volunteers who were less experienced. It was frustrating, because of an outdated date base, so that 75% of the calls made were to non-working or wrong numbers. I proposed that the Y set up a table in the lobby to manually update the contact information for all members. It didn’t happen, and I chose not to participate in this year’s Campaign.

On March 28, I was “summoned” by Chong and Dence to account for a series of incident reports about me. I was allowed to see them, and quickly determined that each of them was totally fabricated. One was solicited and manipulated by the Y’s Membership Director, Brenda Tatum Davis! A staff member, who also wants to keep his/her job told me that , “I talked to the boys and they told me that Brenda put them up to filing the incident report, and ‘they didn’t even know what one was until Brenda put them up to it.’” In the incident report, the boys admit to their own bad behavior that elicited my response. Yet, Chong and Davis chose to dignify it because it was solicited for the purpose of revoking my membership.

The pool culture at the Berkeley Y is characterized by poorly trained lifeguards and reckless indifference towards safety and etiquette. All other pools dedicated for lap swimming rigidly enforce an etiquette system, to ensure that swimmers of ALL abilities are safely accommodated. There no such code enforcement at the Berkeley Y pool.

Dence chooses not to enforce the common etiquette, and maintains other ongoing sources of provocation for swimmers. He has failed to properly train the lifeguards in pool management. On April 8, a violent head-on collision occurred between two members, because a lifeguard sat passively while a swimmer entered a lane right in front of her and caused the accident!

My experiences leave no room for compromise when it comes to pool safety. This includes two drownings at pools, where I issued similar warnings that were ignored. I’ve also performed two rescues when guard staffs were inattentive.

In August 2000, I sent a letter to Director Michael Kammler, at the Osher-Marin Jewish Community Center, advising that their day camp swim program was “an accident waiting to happen.” This was prompted by the absence of any real instruction and the prevalence of chaos, but this letter was ignored. In November 2000, I was suspended from the JCC for doing yoga on the pool deck! No kidding. This is the same JCC that was sued in 2003 when they tried to prohibit breast-feeding on the pool deck. In June 2002, a child, Natasha Lujon-Isaacs, drowned at the Osher-Marin JCC day camp. No one lost their job over this tragedy. The Osher-Marin JCC initiated a campaign of brutal defamation against me, when I tried to publish the prior-warning letter in the Marin Independent Journal.

The City of Berkeley subsidizes over 1,000 memberships at the Berkeley Y, and provides other unusual financial benefits. Because of these generous subsidies, the Berkeley Y serves as a community center for the City of Berkeley. It should therefore be subjected to the same governmental requirements with regard to fairness, the right to organize a union, and constitutional protections of its staff and membership. The financial relationship between the Berkeley YMCA and the City of Berkeley infers a “social contract” between the two entities. The Berkeley YMCA must abide by the same protections and guidelines as any government agency or contractor! Otherwise, the city must sever this relationship.

At the so-called “Downtown” Berkeley YMCA suspended member Scott Prosterman’s abysmal but utterly unsurprising below par experience is, I can personally attest, par for the course—as is the absent or empty response members typically receive from the organization’s administration to their most compelling cares and concerns!

In December 2004 I simply let my own “adult access” membership lapse un-renewed after being a “full-service” member there for some eight years since October 1996. Why? I just got extremely tired and sick to death of supporting financially the equally imperious and indifferent attitude toward members, to say nothing of the typically contemptuous atmosphere, so rampantly perpetuated there by both entrenched administrators and staffers alike.

Like Scott, I had occasion to fruitlessly submit over my nearly decade-long membership multiple written complaints to then director Fran Gallati, who never once cared to address or reply to even the first one. Apparently, Gallati’s spineless administrative approach, now duly handed down to director Peter Chong, was(and is)to outright ignore and disregard member complaints long enough, hoping they’ll simply disappear. So Bravo to Scott for possessing the tenacity and resolve I lacked to persevere with his protest in the face of such obstinate administrative indifference and unconcern!

Denial is epidemic in Berkeley generally but particularly so at that Y. But what’s really rich about Scott’s case is director Chong’s public pronouncements about expected member “decorum.” And man, do Y administrators and staffers alike exult and rejoice at all times in preaching their hypocritical gospels and sanctimonious sermons!

Plastered all over that facility are silly signs superficially proclaiming and extolling the virtue of “respect.” Well, here’s just a small sampling of instances of the paltry “respect” consistently exhibited to members by Y staffers(especially those punk flunkies, as I term them)on a daily, excruciatingly regular basis which this entire sordid episode currently recalls to mind. And mind you, none of these are isolated incidents:

• At the very outset there was one scowling, finger-wagging woman, signing me up for the “adult access” membership, sternly dictating to me to “make sure” sufficient funds were kept available in my account to be directly debited for my monthly membership dues “or else” this or that—as if I presumably intended to default on my payments, or as if management of my personal bank account was any of her business to begin with! If my limited budget priorities demanded that I pay my monthly membership dues later than the appointed transaction date then I(not her and not any other Y staffer)would decide if and when I would—and, indeed, sometimes did!

• Rather than welcome you with a civil let alone courteous(God forbid!)greeting the front reception desk “union” night staff, riveted so immovably to their comfortable reclining chairs, would consistently and sternly accost you verbally with their punctual facility closing-time updates—as if after nearly a decade of membership you still didn’t know the operations hours already, or as if your entry might detain them at their shiftless posts a single nanosecond longer than they could possibly tolerate! Why, once I was accosted there by a puny little scowling preschooler barking aloud, “The Y’s closing in a half hour!” That’s the sort of “respect” toward members these permissive “adult” night staffers instill in their childish charges. So I leaned over to instill some edification of my own and told him quite simply, “No, the Y’s open for another half hour. Think positive!”

• Either that or a gaggle of chattering punk-flunky groupies would stand there gawking and giggling like adolescent dunces should you encounter difficulty entering the front turnstile(because your faded and worn ID card was barely readable by the scanner light)rather than display some semblance of consideration and move their shiftless butts to actually assist you (again God forbid!). And then upon exiting the facility you’d witness that very same idle gaggle of groupies all gathered together, grumbling about how trying and troublesome toiling so strenuously at their shiftless little posts really was!

• Then on to the “strength training center” weight room where equally inept and incompetent floor monitors pretending to be expert fitness “trainers” would abruptly disrupt your bench-press focus and concentration by imposing on you their unsolicited(and unneeded)“spots” or by dispensing equally unsolicited, not to mention downright BOGUS if not detrimental training tips and advice. For the longest time employed there was this graying senior and rather decrepit gaffer-staffer hitting 60 who actually deluded himself into thinking he was some sort of super-stud and irresistible to even the gym’s most pubescent girls!

• The height of irresponsible folly occurred there when the Y hired through spousal nepotism a genetically oversized, mal-proportioned bulk-builder who was temporarily permitted to dupe a whole gang of gullible groupies, knowing no better(still), into practicing a multitude of unsound and unsafe weight-bouncing-jerking-and-swinging(rather than lifting)movements, consisting of cheat-style leverage and momentum(rather than strength or skill), compelling those groupies to attempt detrimental weight-lifts they couldn’t conceivably yet be capable of performing correctly much less beneficially; this all happening on absolutely no other logical or rational basis except that he was “big” and had won some amateur bulk-building contest trophies! Foisted upon the gullible groupies as well were the bulk-builder’s equally excessive protein-ingestion habits responsible for acidic ketones and kidney stress due to impossibly processed amino acids; contributing to their becoming fatter rather than “bigger” as they unsuspectingly expected due to excessive ingestion of fatty meat products. Most tragically was the recent premature death of an older weight-lifting kidney-dialysis casualty, killed by kidney failing-related complications—but doubtless aggravated by his own stubborn, exaggerated protein-ingestion—who had been likewise duped into following blindly and robotically that bulk-builder’s detrimental dietary mal-practices!

• Then onward downstairs to the swimming pool where at closing time the listless lifeguards either shuffled lazily over to the hot tub spa to rudely eject bathers, moaning and groaning all the while about how tired they were and how badly they wanted to go home, or stood clear across the pool, lording it over everyone, shouting loudly and commandingly, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” One punk-flunky girl once insisted that I leave the pool area because it was five minutes(the recommended time limit in the spa for which I was headed)before closing and then leapt off her high horse to actually follow me to the spa to keep on insisting that I heel and leave—in front of multiple bathers still soaking in the spa, where I retorted just as insistently that I’d leave when she stopped singling me out and ordered everybody else out, including multiple swimmers still doing their laps in the pool! Another punk-flunky gave his orders resorting to the finger-wagging routine which I finally told him to stop pointing at me. So fed up did I get with these pool punk-flunkies that I finally myself shouted clear across the pool at one, admonishing him—to the great glee of all spa bathers present, “Address these people as adults sometime and you just might elicit a better response from them! Grow up!” And likewise in the locker rooms the incessantly harping “talking clocks” announcing closing time made their repeated rounds.

Yes, gruff supervising “adults” at the Y inculcate their churlish charges to revel in giving their stern and surly orders. Please or Pardon Me, you see, just aren’t part of their already extremely limited vocabulary under their obnoxious mal-practice of “respect.” The redundantly tedious and tiresome situation there got so ridiculously absurd that sometimes I took to entering the facility with admittedly facetious quips like, “Request permission to enter the stockade!,” or, “Issued any good commands lately?” And upon exiting, saluting, “Yavo, Commandants!”

Not even the slightest semblance of common courtesy much less civil customer service exists at that Y. Its supremely boorish staff appear incapable of grasping the painfully simple concept that members themselves don’t work hard at their own jobs to pay exorbitant gym dues to be high-handedly berated, condescended to, lectured, reprimanded or otherwise ordered around by a bunch of flippant punk-flunkies and their grumpy “adult” indoctrinators.

Free speech and expression on the part of any members happening to object or take exception to the outright ludicrous and laughable situation there is of course held by the negligent, do-nothing administration in the most scurrilous contempt or even derisive ridicule. One haughty “Kinder Kid” punk-flunky, scolding me for lingering several minutes late in the weight-room, huffily commanded, “You know you’re not supposed to be here! Follow instructions!” Well, I just ultimately told them I follow my own instructions unless they come from others with some small semblance of politeness and “respect” (nothing too terribly complicated or outrageous to expect!), and that where I’m supposed to be is in the end my own decision: so I just left.

Through the gossipy grapevine, though, I’d heard that my own infrequent complaints to the administration were quite the behind-the-back laughingstock amongst the Y’s sarcastic and scornful punk-flunky staff. Well, now that Scott Prosterman has defiantly dared to publicly protest against this preposterous nonsense and take the Y to task we can well wonder who’s then having the best, last and loudest laugh!

Joseph Covino Jr American Council On Exercise-certified fitness trainer.

Your recent article on summer activities for Berkeley teens omitted one very important resource. The Berkeley Public Library’s database of local organizations and services, the Berkeley Information Network (BIN), can help teens easily locate organizations needing volunteers or summer camps or plenty of other entertaining summertime activities.

Check out the library’s website at www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org and click on Berkeley Information Network (or the link for Community Organizations). Enter the subject “volunteer” and you’ll find over 100 local organizations that seek help. Or enter “summer camps” for details on 65 nearby camps for teens and over 100 for children. And there’s lots of information on local sports and recreation possibilities, plus local museums, parks, bookstores, and fairs.

If you don’t have internet access at home, come to the Central Berkeley Public Library or your neighborhood branch library for information, or call the BIN at 981-6166.

Jane Scantlebury

BIN Coordinator

•

CANCEROUS CAR

CONCENTRATION

Editors, Daily Planet:

In your recent issues Michael Katz has informed us of the many ways our city’s planners and politicians are closing streets, building “busways,” and eliminating parking in the downtown and along Telegraph Avenue. But while this is going on, our planners and politicians are ignoring the greatest peril of all: the Cancerous Car Concentration on 4th Street. Not only can cars drive and park on 4th Street, but behind the shops are free parking lots. The result? Hundreds of yuppies are invading our city, recklessly spending money on books at the other Cody’s, lattes at Peets, meat at Cafe Rouge, bibelots at the Gardner, and bargains at Crate & Barrel, thoughtlessly leaving sales tax in their wake as they drive away. Surely our city can save this part of town as well. Fourth Street is narrow but could be striped for bus-only and bike lanes if all parking were removed. Developers are waiting to convert the parking lots into five-story apartments with a proper compliment of them accessible to “low” income. With only a little effort this part of town can soon match Shattuck and Telegraph avenues. What is the city waiting for?

Christopher Adams

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AC LINE ON TELEGRAPH

Editors, Daily Planet:

As Michael Katz states, an AC bus line lane though Telegraph is ludicrous: you would breathe the fumes. His example of a functioning cool neighborhood in Philadelphia is a starting point for a vision of a Telegraph that would make Berkeley proud. And, for success, parking must be a part of this vision.

Al Geyer

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BIKE PARKING

Editors, Daily Planet: Michael Katz’s May 30 opinion piece, “Downtown Will Be Berkeley’s Next BART Fiasco,” stated that the bike parking at the Civic Center Garage is “attended.” But is it? Or is it just that the bike parking is located within sight of the garage parking attendant?

Truly attended bike parking involves a human being taking responsibility for the security of the bicycles involved. As I understand it, the Civic Center Garage does nothing of the sort. It’s park at your own risk.

A bike rack within sight of a auto parking attendant is not my idea of truly secure bike parking. The Berkeley BART bike station does provide secure parking and doesn’t absolve itself of all responsibility if a theft or loss—an extremely unlikely possibility—does occur.

Individual bike lockers also provide adequate secure parking for bicycles. Bicycle racks, however close they are to a garage attendant, have their place, but are inherently less secure than lockers or true attended bike parking,

Scott Mace

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ILLEGAL PETITIONING

Editors, Daily Planet:

Ten days ago I encountered two petition-circulators for the proposed ordinance relating to condo conversions and terminating basic rent control protection in Berkeley. One was a group at a card-table at the Berkeley Bowl, the other a single young man (who said he was paid, when asked) at Andronico’s (Acton and University). Neither petitioner included a (required) copy of the ordinance, neither would provide a name and address of the source of the petition or a place where more information could be obtained, both displayed summaries of the ordinance that omitted its provisions relating to rent control, and the group at Berkeley Bowl flatly and specifically misrepresented these provisions verbally and also misrepresented the current status of rent control as the proposed ordinance bears on it.

If this isn’t illegal it ought to be. What proportion of the signatures on the petitions filed were thus fraudulently obtained, one wonders?

The proposed ordinance is itself decepetive, concealing the end of fundamental Berkeley rent control protections within the Trojan Horse of a supposed boon to condo buyers. The device itself confesses the bad faith of the proposal’s authors, who prefer to remain unidentified, at least by the two petition circulators I encountered. And I can certainly understand why.

Jim Powell

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THRIVE, DEMOCRATS

Editors, Daily Planet: Damn, Democrats are dumb! We offer California two WWMs (weaselly white males), one a developer’s flunky and the other a techie who job-hopped until he hit the jackpot, who then savaged each other until they both look like roadkill next to Ahnold. My private fantasy: given the state’s penchant for Hollywood politicos, the obvious choice should have been Allison Janney - tall, commanding, energetic. I can hear the slogan now: C.J. for Governor—THRIVE!

Jerry Landis

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LANGUAGE

Editors, Daily Planet:

I am a recent (one year) resident of Berkeley, and I appreciate access to reading this paper, especially Douglas Allen-Taylor. Another of my favorites is the Friday garden article.

I would like to share my opinion about the June 20 article “The Place to Look for Unusual Garden Tools.” I would like to make a suggestion that in the future the writer and editors consider the audience they are writing to. As a person of part Asian descent i was surprised at some choice of words : esoteric, obscure, clever, kinky, cheap. I have found Hida Tools to be exquisite, well designed, carefully crafted and of good value. I have also found the people at Hida helpful to answer any questions I had about tools I am not familiar with. I ask you to consider if there is some unaware race/cultural bias.

May Kandarian

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TRAFFIC

Editors, Daily Planet:

Last week a dear friend was hit by a car and thrown from his wheelchair while crossing the street, even though he had a green light and was in a crosswalk. This was the third time he had been hit in the Southside area, even though he only crosses major streets at signalized intersections and is extremely wary of approaching vehicles.

I do a lot of walking in the North Oakland/Berkeley area, and I have learned to avoid crossing in front of waiting vehicles unless I have made eye contact with the driver, yet I have had dozens of near misses, one of which included feeling the rubber bumper brushing my calf and the driver entirely unaware that I was there.

The problem is that defensive driving is not enough. A defensive driver is only looking out for vehicles as large and powerful as his own. What about the pedestrians, strollers, bicycles, pushcarts, and wheelchairs, which are smaller and more vulnerable and have to use the same roadway?

Things have gotten so bad that nothing less than the level of public awareness campaign that has so greatly reduced smoking will make the streets safe for all who use them. Every entity on the road needs to be aware of all the other users, no matter how large or small, no matter how powerful or fragile. Sidewalk encroachments and obstruction violations need to be enforced, so that wheelchairs, strollers, and pushcarts do not have to detour into the street. Construction detours need to provide safe alternate routes for pedestrian traffic, bearing in mind that bus riders and others may need to be on a particular side of the street.

One way to beat the rising price of gas is to encourage more people to walk, cycle, and use public transportation, but if the streets are not safe for those who are not sheltered by their personal metal bubbles, more and more cars will continue to fill the roads.

Marcella Murphy

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TUTORING

Editors, Daily Planet: Regarding the Article “Free Tutoring Become Big Business in Public School” by Suzanne La Barre. For most parents who have search the maze of tutoring services provided by public schools, the story only touches on this complex issue. Tutoring service and the amount of monies allocated vary from county to county and school to school. The reasons for choosing services play a key role in the cost and fee for said service. For parents whose children fall within the No Child Left Behind and/or attend a school that have been named as Needs to Improve, there are a many choices. However, the funding is limited to a maximum of two years, when using services outside your public school.

For a list of the tutors, start by going to the website, ED.gov. Click the “Parent” link, and scroll through the link to Options for parents guidelines for the services provided through No Child Left Behind.

There is also a link that lists services provided by state. This link gives you a map of the U.S., where you then click CA, after which a county or school district link is then given. From there information and programs can be found for the school your child attends.

Other options include the use of academic summer programs which can cost the same as a tutoring program for parent who are paying full price or sliding scale fees. Such programs include the Cal State East Bay program for children ages four years through high school and the Summer Young Writer Camps for middle-school children.

A Charlene Matthews

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PUBLIC

TRANSPORTATION

Editors, Daily Planet: In his commentary opposing AC Transit’s proposal to implement BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) on Telegraph Ave, Mr. Katz says—with approbation, I presume: “I can tell you that on South St. (Philadelphia commercial district) you’ll find: Cars, cars, cars on the street. Parking, parking, parking at the curb...”

Mr. Katz has ignored an important bonus of transit oriented development on Telegraph, i.e. a reduction in pollution, congestion, and carbon dioxide emissions. A passenger on a bus produces one half the CO2 emissions per mile as a passenger in an automobile according to the American Public Transportion Association (“Conserving Energy and Preserving the Air We Breathe” (http://www.publictransportation.org/reports/index_energy.asp).

We can no longer afford to debate the merits of the automobile vs. transit. The threats from global warming make it urgent that urban planners make a reduction in CO2 emissions a top priority and this means finding a way to integrate transit into all urban designs in such a way as to reduce automobile travel.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are now higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years. According to the National Resources Defense Council report “Global Warming and the Golden State,” increased CO2 levels will be responsible for the following changes in California:

1. More precipitation will fall as rain than as snow, increasing the risk of floods.

2. There will be a shorter snow season because snowfall will start later and snow will melt earlier.

3. With less snow in the mountains, there will be less fresh water available in the summer, when it is most needed.

4. Sea levels will rise, threatening low-lying communities and the many species that rely on California’s rich wetland ecosystems.

5. Warmer coastal waters could cut of the supply of nutrients to California’s marine ecosystems, with harmful effects on the state’s ocean economy.

Report can be downloaded from http://www.environmentaldefense.org/pubarchive.cfm?subnav=list&t=65&tname=Global%20Warming&campaign=299&page=2.

Transit is also important to older Americans: more than one in five (21%) Americans age 65 and older do not drive.

I urge Mr. Katz to reconsider his opposition to BRT.

Leonard Conly

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LOST CAT

Editors, Daily Planet: This is an appreciation note to many of my North-Central Berkeley neighbors. Since my cat Spike went missing a month ago, I’ve received phone calls almost every day, responding to my posters with possible sightings or useful suggestions, including contacting Berkeley’s Animal Care facility, where staff and volunteers have also been helpful and kind.

The only negative event was when some students of M. L. King School thought it would be amusing to phone me with a purported play-by-play of trying to catch Spike, only to see him hit by a car. This turned out to be bogus.

His brother Butch is still grieving. I haven’t give up; Spike’s sturdy and kind people in this neighborhood (centered on Lincoln and McGee) set out food for cats, and there are fountains, etc. where he could get water. I think he’s making it out there, and just doesn’t know how to find his way home. He’s a long, lean grey and black tabby with very pronounced stripes on his face and back. If spotted, please call 548-1206.

Dick Bagwell

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APOLOGY

Editors, Daily Planet:

My apologies to MICHAEL Katz for getting his name wrong in my letter. (I was taking Mr Katz to task for errors of fact and a gross mischaracterization of my father’s enthusiasm for the David Brower Center.) I had his LAST name wrong in a draft of my letter, which just goes to show it’s a good thing I’m a professor (where my written work is carefully scrutinized) not a journalist, who, writing for the Planet at least, can say pretty much anything that pops into his head.

Barbara Brower

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LIBRARY

Editors, Daily Planet:

In your June 6-8 2006 issue of the Daily Planet I was delighted and also saddened to read the letter to the editor “Public Libray” by Gene Bernardi. I am in total agreement with Mr. Bernardi’s note on the fictional success of the BPL and their inexpert, incompetent Director Jackie Griffin and her management of the BPL. While visiting North Branch last week, I noticed only two library assistants work there. When I worked there from 1989 to 1994, there were four of us and we worked our fingers to the bone: has the patronage of this libray lessened so much in the last 12 years? I think not.

Furthermore, the visitations of a small number of teenagers have required patrons to request a security guard to deter this group of intractable and rude teenagers—a situation that never occured when there were more staff there as well as a teenage librarian, where today there is not thanks to Jackie Griffin. The 64 percent of the BPL staff that signed the Statement of No Confidence have company in the general public, to whom Ms. Griffin is also answerable. “We” are still watching you, Ms. Griffin, and your grade is still “F”. Do us a favor, Ms. Griffin, and Leave BPL.

If the BPL is seeking an (over-qualified) replacement for Ms. Griffin, I can think of no one better than a certain library technician currently at West Branch whose exemplary spirit and knowledge of BPL would place BPL back where it belongs—in the hands of qualified librarians and technicians and assistants whose dedication to Berkeley and its bibliophiles would return to us what we have lost in the hands of a director whose lack of confidence is approaching that of another inept director, President George W. Bush.

Mark K. Bayless

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Editors, Daily Planet:

The treatment of the Peruvian presidential election is indicative of the media’s manipulation of public perception. Two weeks ago the NY Times purveyed an article suggesting that if Alan Garcia beat out Ollanta Humala in Peru the cause would be the “intervention” of Venezuela’s leftist President, Hugo Chavez. Chavez endorsed Humala. Associated Press, June 5, ran with Alan Garcia’s victory chant that “Peruvians had sent an overwhelming message Sunday to Chavez that they wanted no part of the ‘strategy of expansion of a militaristic, retrograde model that he has tried to impose in South America.’”

That’s all b.s. I visited Peru in September before Humala appeared out of nowhere. His rejection by many urban Peruvians was fairly predictable. Humala is from a military family which has advocated imprisonment of gays and killing of opponents. Peruvians had seen enough horrors from both sides during the Sendero Luminoso (shining path) period, including severe corruption and a dirty war of terror by their government. Humala scared them, and Garcia used the Chavez endorsement to increase fears. But Chavez is immensely popular in the region. He does not represent the militaristic politics that Garcia or the US claim. He has instead supported the education, empowerment, health and success of common people. That Chavez chose to endorse Humala because of his nationalism was Chavez’ big mistake. However, it is the US and Alan Garcia whose propaganda simplified this into Peruvians voting against Chavez. By their logic Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales of Bolivia only won elections because George Bush supported their opponents.

Thank you for Mr. Allen-Taylor’s stimulating review of Charles DeBose’s The Sociology of African-American Language. Not long ago I submitted a book review to a left leaning, youth oriented newspaper in San Francisco but was informed they don’t print book reviews. So thank you for encouraging us all to put our thinking caps on.

The issues of African-American language and by extension all black culture in the U.S. and its relative dominance when counterposed to other cultures is one that has long fascinated me. I was never one to simply believe the vast differences in African-American and white cultures were simply reflections of race. These beliefs were reinforced more than thirty years ago when I traveled to Cuba for the first of many subsequent trips. In 1974 I was astounded to see and hear black and white Cubans dancing, singing and speaking exactly the same. If you closed your eyes or listened to the radio it was impossible then, as it is today, to know if you’re listening or watching an Afro-Cuban or white Cuban. “How is this possible?” was a question I asked myself for many years.

These kinds of observations and issues, in my opinion, lie at the heart of the great conundrum in this country over African-American language and culture. Why is black culture so different from white culture and why do whites so often mimic black culture? For instance, why do so many white singers always try to sound like Mary J. Blige but you never hear any black singers trying to sound like Frank Sinatra?

It is not clear to me, from reading Allen-Taylor’s review that DeBose addresses these questions. Framing the peculiarities of Ebonics as simply a reaction to the oppressor is not a full-fledged response. Allen-Taylor’s anecdote about being in the inner city and hearing young black males practicing their rap is accurate but not nearly as interesting to me as being in the inner city and hearing white youth, Philipino, Cambodian and Viet Namese youth talking exactly as if they are black. To me that condition dramatizes exactly what is America.

Consider that in the late eighteenth century English tourists in America often wrote home and complained that Americans were debasing themselves and losing the ability to speak English. “They speak just like the slaves!” was a complaint often heard then. Therefore the development of African-American language has long been in existence and its influence on whites as well as other cultural aspects is without question. Why was this never the case in Cuba and other place like Cuba? Why is it so apparently unique here?

I have come to believe, and my understanding has been facilitated by the critical race theory movement, that the answers to these long unanswered question lie in the way in which slavery was administered.

In most of the colonies that became the United States, Europeans significantly outnumbered Africans. Therefore, in order for the elite Europeans to maintain control and power the definition of who was considered white was constricted. Anyone with one drop of African blood was deemed black. Originally the Irish and Italians were not considered white. However, in order that the various groups of Europeans become considered white, European culture atrophied in the cause of creating white solidarity.

For the Africans the situation was reversed. In the face of brutal, white oppression racial solidarity made it necessary for the various African nationalities to become black, or negro or colored. For the Africans, culture—language dance, music—became the tool of racial solidarity. In almost mathematical terms, to the degree the the blacks were oppressed, to the same degree the culture was fortified. For instance it is often said the Blues, considered by many the bedrock of all modern music, was a response to the federally endorsed campaign of lynchings of African-Americans.

Likewise, on the other side of the coin so to speak, in the late 1950s white DJs across America were vilified and subjected to political and economic sanctions for their part in the so-called payola scandal, accepting money and gifts for playing pre-selected records on the radio. What the DJs were really being castigated for, however, was nothing more than playing black music for white audiences, or enhancing the africanization of American culture, a process that really began in 1619, when it is claimed, the first Africans were brought here from Angola and continues to this day, most recently with the Hyphy movement.

Time and space do not allow a close look at Cuba and her assimilated sisters Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela etc., except to say they are mirror images of the United States in that anyone with one drop of white blood is considered white, the precise opposite of here. In those countries assimilation has been used to keep blacks on the bottom and whites on top, thereby giving the lie to those who promote multiculturalism and colorblind policies here. Ward Connerly, do I have your attention? I didn’t think so.

The great Ebonics brouhaha of the mid-1950s was a progressive and right-headed attempt, I think, to recognize the real conditions of African-American students and use it to their advantage, namely to recognize Ebonics as a tool and use it to teach standard English. The great irony in that situation, however, was that the proposal that was submitted to the Oakland Board of Education was poorly written and caused confusion that allowed many to reject and ridicule the movement. Too bad, it would have been a huge step forward.

The issue of African-American language is an important issue, especially when reviewed in context of the African American condition. I’m looking forward to reading DeBose’s book. My hope is that through the study of our language he begins to confront the real reasons why African-Americans have always, forever and continue to be marginalized in America.

Next year, the Berkeley Art Center hopes to celebrate its 40th anniversary. The Center, housed in a small gem of a Ratcliff building beside the creek in Live Oak Park, has been displaying the work of Berkeley artists since 1967. But the prospects for a 2007 celebration are far from certain. The more likely scenario is that Berkeley’s municipal art gallery will be forced to close down before its anniversary date arrives. Its budget has been shrinking every year and if the city cannot restore the grant for the coming year to the 2001 level, the Center will not be able to keep its doors open.

The loss would be a sad one for the entire city. The Center has been a civic showcase for a wide range of Berkeley artists, bringing some of them to national prominence. Each year it sponsors a Youth Art Festival; this year over 200 Berkeley High student artists exhibited their work. Recently it began a series on “Berkeley Treasures,” work by internationally acclaimed artists who may not have received the attention they deserve in their hometown. Work includes the photographs of Brenda Prager, who created the Addison Street Windows, and the crafts of Kay Sekimachi and Bob Stocksdale.

BAC’s 2001 exhibition, “The Whole World Is Watching: Peace and Social Justice Movements of the 1960s and 1970s” just completed a five-year national tour, including runs at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis and the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. Last year’s “From Isolation to Connection: Artists Living with Psychiatric Disabilities” received unusual acclaim and funding.

Other shows have focused on issues of special appeal to Berkeley’s multicultural values. “Ethnic Notions: Black Images in the White Mind” explored the perpetuation of racism through caricature and stereotype. “Asian Roots, Western Soil” celebrated the contributions of Japanese aesthetics to American culture.

The Center presents a wide range of art, including films, chamber music, plays, dance, and discussions. But while its ambitions have grown, its non profit resources have steadily shrunk, forcing its budget from $169,000 in 2004 to $154,000 in 2005 to $140,000 in 2006. The city’s contribution has decreased as well, from $92,000 in 1979 to $68,000 in 2001, to $42,000 last year. With the paid staff down to one and a half persons, there is nothing more to cut. If the city cannot restore the $20,000 per year reduction it made five years ago, the Center will likely close its doors this summer.

This happened once before: in 1978, following the cutbacks forced by Proposition 13, the Center closed for a year. With the building locked down, BAC’s redwood-shaded area alongside Codornices Creek became a littered hideout for drug dealers. One of Berkeley’s treasures—an extraordinarily beautiful spot in an extraordinarily beautiful city—turned into a hazard, a danger to avoid.

We urge the Council and the mayor to act as good stewards of Berkeley’s artistic and architectural heritage, and keep the Art Center open. For more information about the Berkeley Art Center, call 510/644-6893.

A unhappy milestone has just passed. On May 31, our latest 15-year lease on Nexus from the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society expired. Although Nexus is attempting to negotiate with the Humane Society to purchase the property, the Humane Society had indicated they intended to place a metal fence around the vacated building on June 1. That fence did not go up on that date, but who knows about tomorrow?

In a variation of the Drayage demise facilitated by the city of Berkeley allegedly for the Drayage’s code violations, the Humane Society has offered to place a fence around the building to attempt to mitigate their non-compliance with the legal requirement for seismic upgrading of the landmarked Austin Building structure, originally Standard Tool & Die. The city waived fines placed against the Humane Society and accepted the fence placement as a temporary seismic remedy. This is despite the fact that the Building and Safety Division of the city’s Planning and Development Department has indicated some 50 buildings—many presumably occupied—in Berkeley are out of compliance with the unreinforced masonry seismic retrofit requirement. Vacant buildings are prone to blight and fire and several vacant structures have burned in West Berkeley. Where is the guarantee a fence will protect passers-by and parked cars from collapse of the brick façade of the steel-frame building, if an earthquake occurs before the building changes hands and the seismic upgrades proceed?

As the building owner, the Humane Society could have applied for another waiver of the arbitrary “deadline” but didn’t. As the tenants negotiating to buy the building, we asked to apply for the extension but were not allowed to by the Building Division.

The boarded-up Drayage is squatted, according to a former resident. In the case of vacant buildings, “accidental” fires often result in cleared sites which are easier to sell and build upon. The agreement reached between the Building Division and the Humane Society provides for no mechanisms for safeguarding the emptied-out buildings.

ZONING PROTECTION:

Nexus is also—theoretically!—protected by the arts and crafts ordinance and the protective zoning that requires comparable replacement space for arts and crafts uses elsewhere in West Berkeley if those uses are removed from their existing location. The sale of Nexus to some developer other than Nexus certainly raises that distinct possibility. Nexus and its community gallery are specifically referenced in the West Berkeley Plan. Some 25 artists and woodworkers currently use Nexus, many more over several decades. Many of the artists are UC Art Department graduates. The Nexus Gallery has been subsidized by Nexus Institute for years, providing exhibit/performance space for thousands since the early 1980s when the Gallery opened. Countless classes and open studios by Nexus artists have also occurred over the years.

Jim Hynes, Assistant to the City Manager, affirmed the “protected use” of the 19,000 sq. ft. the Nexus occupies in a July 23, 2004 memo. Notable West Berkeley activists such as former Planning Commission member/woodworker John Curl and photographer/Nexus Neighbor/West Berk-eley Association of industrial Companies (WeBAIC) member Rick Auerbach have spoken out repeatedly in support of Nexus, most recently on May 24 when John Curl spoke at the Art Commission meeting. The continuing existence of Nexus runs counter to the trend in West Berkeley and elsewhere of upscale "life style lofts", but many of the new residents welcome the amenity of Nexus, attending Nexus events and openings and supporting the landmark nomination.

CIVIC ARTS COMMISSION STEPS TO THE PLATE:

At their May 24 meeting, the Civic Arts Commission heard from John Curl and several Nexus artists, where the Nexus situation was agendized as an action item. A strong letter of support was endorsed unanimously, calling for delay of the Nexus evictions, affirming the protected arts and crafts use under the zoning, and calling upon displaced artists and craftspeople to be relocated in comparable space in West Berkeley before any eviction can happen.

This letter of support and concern has been forwarded to the City Council for action.

WE ARE NOT “HOBBYISTS”—NEXUS ARTISTS SHOW AND TEACH WIDELY:

Nexus Artist Co-President Carol Newborg is included in the exhibit "beyond Boundaries", a show of installation and multidisciplinary work, at the SFMOMA Artists Gallery in Fort Mason, San Francisco, June 7—30, opening Wed., June 7. Lisa Kokin is featured in "Menagerie" at the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Folk Art in August , and Robert Brokl is artist-in-residence at the new de Young Museum June 14-30. Caitlin Mitchell-Dayton provided the real paintings and drawings for the fictional art student/up-and-coming art world star in the just-released "Art School Confidential." Sharon Siskin is an assistant professor at USF who for many years organized exhibits in the Nexus Gallery by her students who were HIV-positive or had AIDS.

CAN YOU STILL HAVE AN “ARTS DISTRICT” WITHOUT ARTISTS?

Nexus thrived for over 30 years because it was able to put down roots at a time before West Berkeley became the developer magnet it is now. The artists who maintained studios there—despite the unheated, even funky conditions—flourished, developing their craft and sharing it with the greater community in Berkeley and beyond.

If removed from Nexus and my studio of 24 years, I hope to continue as an artist elsewhere, but I will be forced out of Berkeley. The Drayage tenant attorney says 90% of the former Drayage residents have relocated outside of Berkeley. This is not just our personal loss. I would suggest Berkeley will be poorer as well. Its elected officials and staff provide lip service toward support for arts and artists but in reality mostly just stand by as the well-established Nexus cooperative of 25 artists and woodworkers and a community gallery are forced out to make way for—no mystery here—yet more life-style lofts. Maybe one day—too little too late—there will be a City-sponsored program to “reintroduce” artists in West Berkeley, their former “natural habitat,” long after they went extinct.

Robert Brokl is a Nexus building artist.

Columns

Democrats appear to be gaining momentum in their bid to wrest control of the House of Representatives from the Republicans. According to veteran D.C. prognosticator, Charlie Cook, there are now 46 House seats in play.

That’s an increase of ten over his previous forecast. In order to prevail, the Democrats will have to hold onto 10 shaky seats and win 15 of the 36 tenuous GOP seats.

Judging from the results of last Tuesday’s hotly contested election to replace disgraced Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham in California’s District 50, Democrats have their work cut out for them. Despite running a strong race, the Dems’ candidate, Francine Busby, lost by 4 percent. (In 2004 Bush carried the district by 10 percent.) Repugs felt that they had to retain this seat and lavished more than $5 million on Brian Bilbray’s campaign, outspending Dems 2:1.

Here’s a look at sixteen races where Democrats have good shot at taking a Republican Congressional seat:

• California 11: Democrat Jerry McNerney is running for the Congressional seat occupied by ultraconservative Republican Richard Pombo. The district leans Republican, but there is great dissatisfaction with Pombo. McNerney has a real shot, but may be too liberal for the district. At least that’s what Repugs will claim in what promises to be the most expensive California Congressional contest.

• In Connecticut two Republican Congressman are vulnerable in Districts that have traditionally voted Democrat. In the 2nd district, incumbent Rob Simmons is getting stiff opposition from Democrat Joe Courtney. In the 4th district, incumbent Chris Shays is having trouble with Diane Farrell. Cook rates both races as toss ups.

• Illinois 6: Ultraconservative Republican Henry Hyde is retiring. The contest will pit Republican Peter Roskam versus Tammy Duckworth, a retired Army pilot who lost both legs when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq. While this is a slightly Republican district, it’s hard to imagine that anyone who meets Duckworth would vote for her opponent.

It’s an indication of the trouble the GOP is having that two of their Indiana seats are vulnerable. In the 8th district, incumbent John Hostettler is getting the race of his life from County Sheriff Brad Ellsworth. In the 9th district, incumbent Mike Sodrel is having a tough time with Democrat Baron Hill. The Dems may well win both races.

• Iowa 1: Republican Jim Nussle is retiring to run for Governor. Democrat Bruce Braley will face Republican Mike Whalen in a district that leans Democrat.

• Kentucky 4: Republican Geoff Davis is facing stiff competition from the former Democratic incumbent Ken Lucas. Although this district has traditionally voted Republican, Cook calls the race even.

• New Mexico 1: Republican Heather Wilson is facing stiff competition from New Mexico Attorney General Patsy Madrid. Polls show that this interesting race is a dead heat.

There’s a lot going on in Ohio in this election. The 6th district Representative was Democrat Ted Strickland, who’s running for Governor. Now, Democrat Charlie Wilson is favored over Republican Chuck Blasdel. In the 18th district, incumbent Republican Bob Ney is under investigation for his relationship with Jack Abramoff; Democratic challenger Zack Space is running an unexpectedly strong race.

For the Democrats to win control of the House, they have to take all of these seats, or pick off a couple from the more than two dozen other races where their candidate has a shot at unseating a Republican incumbent. They also must protect contested Democratic seats in Georgia, Jim Marshall (8) and John Barrow (12), Illinois, Melissa Bean (8), Iowa, Leonard Boswell (3), Louisiana, Charlie Melancon (3), South Carolina, John Spratt (5), Texas, Chet Edwards (17), Vermont, where Independent Bernie Sanders is running for Senate and Democrat Peter Welch is favored, and West Virginia, Mollohan (1).

Democrats have a reasonable chance of regaining the House, but it’s far from a slam-dunk as the Busby loss illustrates.

Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer. He can be reached at bobburnett@comcast.net.

It’s exciting to know a politician, to be able to say nonchalantly when her name comes up in conversation, “Oh Ronnie Caplane, of course I know her.” It is less thrilling to acknowledge that as her friend, I should be out there on the campaign trail with her, supporting her causes, informing her constituents, contributing in some way to her power base.

Even before Nora, Ronnie’s campaign manager, e-mailed me with a polite request for help, I knew I was in trouble. I wanted to lend a hand, I really did, but I am not a campaigner. I cannot stand in front of Safeway and collect signatures for a cause. I cannot make myself knock on doors and talk about political issues with strangers. I cannot shake people’s hands and ask them to vote for someone, even an intelligent, courageous dear friend. This is, perhaps, why I am not yet the president of the United States.

Despite my aversion to ringing doorbells and making cold calls, I knew I had to do something, so I went down to campaign headquarters and got a Ronnie Caplane For Assembly yard sign. I stuck it in the garden in front of my house and felt better, but not for long.

Almost every weekend for 14 months Ronnie crisscrossed the district, hard at work giving speeches, cutting ribbons, marching in parades, and attending fundraisers. I was inconspicuously absent, never able to make a rally or fair, a house party or precinct walk.

As promised, Nora called me right before the election and asked if I could distribute door hangers to certain houses in my neighborhood. “You don’t have to talk,” she said.

“You don’t even knock on the door. You just wrap the promo piece around the knob and go on to the next residence.”

“Okay,” I said. “I can handle it.”

“And,” she added, “you don’t go to every house. You only hit the homes of female registered Democrats.”

It turns out that as a doorknob campaign tagger I’m an overachiever. I didn’t just tag the houses that were on my list—I hung a piece of literature on EVERY doorknob on every house and apartment building within my precinct. And when I found that I had extra hangers, I called Nora and volunteered to do all the blocks between 51st and Aileen streets.

No one yelled at me. No one kicked me off their porch or told me to take my door hangers elsewhere. In fact, no one really noticed me at all. My confidence boosted, I asked Nora for another assignment.

“On election day can you call everyone on your list and remind them to vote?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll do it.” I was becoming a real go-getter. Good lord, I was morphing into one of those annoying people whom I always hang up on.

Last Tuesday I phoned each individual on my list. With only one exception, everyone I spoke with was polite and friendly. Sometimes they even thanked me for calling.

Ronnie did not win the election. But she proved herself to be strong and energetic, dedicated, resourceful, and sincere. I hope she decides to run again for office. If she does, I’ll ask if I can be in charge of silent literature distribution. I liked making a small contribution to the democratic process, and, as it turns out, I’m really quite good at the doorknob thing.

Bottlebrush trees are one of the bright, amusing notes on our streets, sporting those funny flowers shaped like, yes, bottlebrushes with perky little green-leaf tufts at their ends. They’re tough and not pest-prone, and easy enough to find in nurseries. Their hard little leaves and shreddy bark give them a ragamuffin air to match the spiky inflorescences. The red flowers attract birds—hummingbirds of course, but I’ve seen a stray Cape May warbler, a nectar-seeker in winter, using them too.

We’ve lost a few of the trees that I knew in North Berkeley, but enough of them are in gardens and public places than I don’t worry about a population decline. Besides, they’re exotics—from Australia—and as far as I know in no danger in their home range.

The bottlebrush—Callistemon—species I see here, mostly of the weeping (C. viminalis) or lemon (C. citrinus, formerly C. lanceolatus) sort, are among those trees that people ought to be planting under utility wires, because they generally don’t get very tall and it’s easy to control their height. They’re fun to prune.

In fact, my general complaint about local weeping bottlebrushes is that people don’t know how to prune them. Longtime readers of this column will not be surprised to hear that, as people who prune despite not knowing how are a frequent target of my uncharitable scorn. But weeping bottlebrush trees, especially, practically have roadmaps built in.

It’s easier to show you than to tell you, as Bre’r Rabbit would say, but here’s a first step: Don’t just shear them at the bottom in the equivalent of a bowl cut. Get underneath—after nesting season is over, please—and start cutting the branches closest to the trunk. They almost have “Cut Here” dotted lines; just cut on a leaf node, above a row of seedpods if there are any on the branch. For the first few, though, cut next to the trunk.

When you’ve opened those up a bit, stand and watch the tree. It should be a bit more flowing when it moves now, a bit bouncy but graceful. Cut a little more, still from the inside. Leave some deeper layers, but make them of uneven lengths.

When you have two forks in a twig, cut off the lower, inside one. This is counterintuitive only the first time, and is a good strategy with any weeping tree. Weepers should reach out a little, bounce like a waterfall; half their charm is in their motion in the breeze and their illusion of flowing even when still.

If you end up with something that looks like a parasol, stop. The tree will soon fill in some of the space, and you’ll be able to form your own ideas of what you and the tree can make happen next. Within whatever limits you have—traffic, the side of a building—try to broaden the reach of the tree, to let it move and dance and show off its flexibility.

There are two reasons for the opening-it-up strategy: Those inside branchlets are the ones that accumulate dirt, insects, mold, and such, and because they get less sun they’re less vigorous. Callistemons are tough, but there’s no need to stress the tree by making part of it a bug-and-pathogen farm. Also, they really aren’t supposed to look like bottlebrushes themselves: the common name refers to their startling, usually red, flowers.

Since the ones we see here are generally strictly ornamentals and generally small, it’s startling to read a quote from nineteenth-century handbook of Australian plants that recommends the wood of lemon bottlebrush for “ship-building and wheel-wright’s work and… mallets.”

But if you’ve ever had to cut one down, you’ve come to appreciate the toughness of the wood. The wood of some Callistemons is recommended for use in fenceposts and such things that come in contact with soil, because they resist rot. But mostly they’re ornamentals here. They’re tough enough to be used in hot places like parking lots, and their density is easily controlled so they make good screens of whatever opacity you like. I haven’t heard that they’re invasive, but if you live next to wildlands, check that out before planting one. Plant it high and don’t let it stand in water, and it’ll be good company.

Photograph by Ron Sullivan:

The exuberant flowers of weeping bottlebrush attract birds as varied as hummingbirds and Cape May warblers. This one is a street tree on Park Avenue in Oakland.

“He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher—the Wonder House as the natives called the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that ‘fire-breathing dragon,’ hold the Punjab; for the great green bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot.”

So Rudyard Kipling opens his Magnus opus—Kim—the tale of Kimball O’Hara, orphan of an Irish Color-Sergeant in England’s colonial army, then warring with the locals in India’s northwest frontier. It is a story of the 19th century “Great Game,” when the Russians and British blackguarded one another in remote villages and frozen passes, fighting for glory, empire, and the crossroads of Central Asia.

The Imperial War Museum in London still celebrates the men of the Black Watch regiment, the fusiliers, and the dragoons who fought a seemingly endless war along what is now the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. There are no monuments, however, to the real victims of the “Great Game,” the Pushtun, the Tajik, the Hazara and the Uzbeks, pitted against one another in a deadly chess game played by men whose capitals lay half a world away.

How just like the old days it must be for British Lieutenant General David Richards, commander of North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces in southern Afghanistan. NATO, taking over from the United States, is pouring troops into Helmand Province, 8,000 of which will be British.

Speaking in Kandahar, not all that far from England’s old colonial fortress at Quetta, he announced, “I have the force, the rules of engagement, and the caveat-free environment to do everything I need.”

One wonders what Greek commander in Alexander’s army made that same speech, what Soviet general thought he also had “the force” and a “caveat-free environment” to do as he pleased.

In truth, General Richards holds exactly the ground he stands on—so long as it isn’t nightfall. After four years of war, the United States-led coalition is scrambling to contain a spreading insurgency, not only in the south, but the north and the east as well. In late May, Taliban insurgents overran a district capital in Oruzgan Province, and according to the Financial Times, a government presence doesn’t exist outside the Helmand Province capital of Lashkar Gar. Two weeks ago Kabul exploded, with tens of thousands of people stoning American military vehicles and chanting for foreign troops to leave.

This ground and history is familiar for the British. It will be, after all, England’s fourth war in Afghanistan.

The first (1838 –42) was ignited when the Brits forcibly installed Shah Shujah as the Afghan king. That went rather badly, and riots finally forced the British out of Kabul in 1842. As the army was retreating to India, it was ambushed, overrun and destroyed. The war ended when the English marched back, ravaged Kabul, burned the great bazaar, and killed 20,000 Afghans.

The second war was in 1878 when the British seized the Khyber Pass, and the third in 1919 when the Afghans had the effrontery to demand control of their own foreign affairs.

The current fighting is described as a “resurgence” by the fundamentalist Taliban, but one needs to be very careful when it comes to dissecting the sources of post-colonial wars. The “Taliban” are overwhelmingly Pushtun, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. What people don’t generally know is that while religion does play a role in all this, the present fighting is a case of nursing the pinion that impelled the steel. And who is better at that than the British?

When India and Pakistan were partitioned in 1947, the British Foreign Office insisted that the Pushtun had to choose between Pakistan or India, rather than joining their brethren in Afghanistan. The English—ever the masters at using ethnicity to keep people divided and weak—knew the Pushtuns would remain fiercely independent of the Pakistani government in the Punjab. At the same time, Afghanistan would be splintered between four ethnic groups, divisions Whitehall could always use to manipulate the politics of Central Asia.

What the British did not figure on was that in 2006 they would be fighting the same people who kept the colonial graveyards of India well populated with the young lads from Cork, Dundee and Suffolk who came down from the high passes in wooden boxes.

The event that touched off the riots in Kabul was an auto accident between a U.S. military convoy and Afghan civilians. When angry people began gathering, U.S. troops opened fire. By the time the riots were over, almost 200 people had been wounded, and at least 20 killed.

But demonstrators were also protesting an air attack that killed 16 civilians in the village of Tolokan in Helmand Province. It was not the first such incident. At least 33 other civilians were killed in an air strike May 21, and villagers are reportedly streaming into Kandahar to avoid the bombings.

U.S. spokesman Col. Tom Collins said the deaths in Tolokan were the fault of the Taliban: “The ultimate cause of why civilians were injured and killed is because the Taliban knowingly, willfully chose to occupy the homes of these people.”

Collins’ statement was a violation of international law, regardless of what the Taliban did.

Article 48 of the 1977 addition to the Geneva Conventions, Part IV, states “The parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.”

Article 50 is even more explicit: “The presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character.”

In short, if insurgents are mixed up with civilians, you can’t call in air strikes, period. Anyone who does should be hauled before the International Court at The Hague.

The bombings and the anger generated by the occupation are not the only things that fueled the Kabul uprising. The city has a 50 percent unemployment rate, and 40 percent of the population goes hungry.

Some in Afghanistan are doing quite well, particularly if they have anything to do with the drug trade. The Taliban initially suppressed opium production, but war, coupled with a failure to adequately fund a program aimed at weaning farmers off poppy growing, means Afghanistan is now once again the world’s largest producer of opium.

Opium profits not only fuel the insurgency, they fill the coffers of the United States-supported warlords who are once again in power. It was the corruption and violence of those warlords that originally laid the ground for the Taliban takeover. The only thing keeping the warlords in power today is the U.S. and NATO armed forces.

Zam-Zamman breathes fire no more, replaced by F-15s and AC-130U “Spooky” guns ships spitting artillery rounds and 40 mm cannon shells. The efficiency of death has evolved, but the “game” is the same and for the people of Afghanistan, it is a story as old as their origins.

Mullah Mohammed Kaseem Faroqi, the Pushtun Taliban commander in Helmand Province, recently told the London Times, “My message to Tony Blair and the whole of Britain is, ‘Do not send your children here. We will kill them.’”

And so they will, though dead Afghan children are likely to outnumber them. It is time to retire the “Great Game” to the pages of history and literature and bring the troops home.

The job of the news media is supposed to be to report on the news as we find it.

But sometimes, some of us in the profession get a little excited and report on the news as we want it to be rather than as it actually is, so that the reporting or editing process itself can push reality in the direction we want it to go. Our good friends at Fox “News” Channel are most often accused of this overeagerness to shape rather than to reflect.

So did our other friends at the San Francisco Chronicle over the way Alameda County chose to count our votes in the other night’s elections.

In case you have not been following these events, Alameda County chose to move to electronic touchscreen voting several years ago, purchasing the machines put out by the Diebold company (the same company whose owner pledged to work for a George Bush victory).

But when a new California law went into effect in January, mandating that all electronic voting machines produce a paper trail to prove that the electronic vote count has not been tampered with, Alameda County was forced to abandon the old Diebold machines, which did not have such a paper trail. Because the county could not purchase the new machines by last Tuesday’s primary election, the county decided to conduct the election with hand-marked paper ballots counted by scanners at a central location in downtown Oakland.

But for some reason, the folks at the Chronicle did not seem to understand—or communicate—those simple facts in their recent election stories.

In a June 2 Chronicle article a few days before the election entitled “Hand Count Of Alameda Ballots Could Delay Election Results,” Associated Press writer Samantha Young wrote that “Alameda county’s return to low-tech voting Tuesday could make for a long evening for poll workers and leave the neck-and-neck Democratic gubernatorial primary undecided overnight.” Ms. Young added that “the county's inability to quickly process paper ballots after shelving its electronic voting machines may make Alameda the determining factor because 5.7 percent of the state’s registered Democrats live there,” and also noted that the county “is in a jam because they do not have enough optical scanners to count the ballots at all polling places.”

Note the code words here that all denote bad things happening or projected to happen by the Chronicle: “delay,” “low-tech,” “long evening,” “undecided,” “inability to quickly process,” “shelving,” “in a jam,” and “do not have enough.”

On the Wednesday following the election, the Chronicle published a story by staff writer Rick DelVecchio telling us that the predicted result had, indeed, occurred, the headline reading that “Hand-Counting Delays Results In Alameda County.” “Alameda County election workers were hand-counting some 200,000 ballots late Tuesday,” Mr. DelVecchio wrote, “and county officials said the job would take hours to finish—long enough to delay close gubernatorial and Oakland mayoral contest final results until late this morning.”

Whether or not that statement was actually correct depends upon your definition of the word “delay.”

At 11 o’clock on Tuesday night, a time when most voters stay up to view the election results on the news, almost none of the closely-contested Oakland mayoral race votes had been counted (Dellums was leading De La Fuente 44 percent to 36 percent, with less than 1 percent of the total in). But the lack of substantial results at 11 o’clock is hardly unusual in any close election, regardless of how the votes are being counted.

At 8 o’clock on Wednesday morning, when I got to my computer and went to the Alameda County Registrar of Voters website, more than 98 percent of the precincts had been counted in the mayoral election. Within a half an hour, that figure had jumped to 100 percent, with Dellums winning 50.2 percent of the unofficial count. So by the time most people were leaving for work in the morning the day after the election, the available vote totals were in and reported.

We also learned that the race was still undecided, and that absentee and provisional ballots were yet to be counted.

Again, in a close election (“close” being the amount of votes Mr. Dellums needed to avoid a runoff), having a race undecided by the morning after the election is not unusual.

So the uncertainty of the final outcome has less to do with the “delay” in counting the votes—this is the time provisional ballots are counted, under any circumstances—but with the closeness of the race itself. And given that a November runoff may be necessary, and the new mayor will not take office until next January in any event, what’s the problem with the wait of a day or so to determine the outcome?

And one must remember that the “delay” in the Oakland results were only in the mayor’s race. In the Districts 2 and 6 Council races, the 16th Assembly seat race, and the Measure A and B bond elections, the results were available about the same time as coffee and eggs and the Chronicle article on Wednesday morning announcing that “Hand-Counting Delays Results”.

Meanwhile, there were other problems with the Chronicle’s reporting on Tuesday’s elections in Alameda County.

“The delay,” Mr. DelVecchio wrote in his Wednesday story (there’s that word again) “was triggered by the county's decision in March to get rid of its high-tech, touch-screen voting machines, which were widely criticized because they couldn't produce paper records.” This makes it look like Alameda County had a choice in the matter.

In fact, as we have noted above, Alameda County could not use the Diebold touchscreen machines any more because of a change in state law, so there was no “decision to get rid of” the Diebold machines by Alameda County. The decision was made by the state legislature, and affected any county using a touchscreen screen without paper trail capabilities.

And in her June 2 Chronicle article, Ms. Young wrote that Alameda County officials “hope to sell or trade the [Diebold] touchscreen machines for upgraded models that meet the new requirements. The new machines should be delivered before the November election, although the county is still in negotiations with several companies.”

That gives the impression that Alameda County is contemplating the continued use of touchscreen voting machines as the general method of voting for the November elections and beyond.

Actually, what Alameda County decided on at a special Thursday Supervisors meeting this week is the continued use of paper ballots for most voters in the November election and beyond, along with the purchase of scanning machines so that each precinct would have its own scanner (remember, last Tuesday, all of the scanning was done by a limited number of scanning machines at a central location in Oakland). Touchscreen voting machines will also be used in November, but only a limited number designed specifically to accomodate handicapped voters who come to the polls and desire to vote without assistance. Given the success of Tuesday’s elections—and the lack of significant delay in reporting the results—county supervisors could have even voted to save money by not purchasing any new scanners and continue to do a centralized vote count with the scanners the county already has.

In any event, it is “interesting,” isn’t it (always a word I like to use), that the Chronicle seems so obsessed about vote-count delays in Alameda County that never actually happened, and that the Chronicle articles seem so bent towards pushing the Alameda County to purchase electronic touchscreen voting machines that the county has not determined that it needs.

Not only must butterflies go through repeated and incredible physical changes to reach adulthood, but at every stage they’re beset by predators and threats from the weather, chemicals and pesticides, lack of suitable food, and encroachment on habitat by humans and invasive plants.

A new film, directed and produced in the Bay Area by Oaklander Bill Levinson, provides a provocative and visually rich look at the familiar insects and the cycles of their lives.

In The Company of Wild Butterflies can be seen locally this Saturday in San Francisco or next Tuesday, June 13, along with a special tour at the UC Botanical Garden (See sidebar).

Levinson, who has other documentary film work to his credit, became fascinated with butterflies at the Berkeley garden of his sister, UC-trained Sally Levinson, who characterizes herself as a “consulting entomologist.”

He began to film, up close, the habits and transformations of the wild butterflies she welcomes to her yard and often raises indoors during their pre-flight stages.

The result, with the expert assistance of his sister and others, is a sympathetic and engaging documentary illuminating the multiple lives of butterflies and what they need to survive and co-exist in a world dominated by humans.

It’s likely that no other creature with which humans come in regular contact goes through such complex change as the butterfly. It experiences four distinctively different stages of life: egg, larva, chrysalid, and winged adult.

The changes are startling in form and scale. The film notes that if a human infant grew as fast as a caterpillar, it would achieve not only adulthood, but some ten tons in added weight, within a few weeks.

The core and exotic beauty of the documentary is the presentation of the butterfly life cycle, shifting back and forth between various locally familiar species, including fawn brown buckeyes, yellow and black anise swallowtails, orange and black painted ladies, orange and silver fritillaries, cabbage whites, and monarchs.

Amazing transformational moments are detailed on film, from tiny, translucent, caterpillars chewing their way out of egg shells, to an older growing, caterpillar molting off its tight skin, to the adult butterfly emerging from its chrysalid case.

The film is most engaging and informative in capturing the nuances of each stage. For example, the molting caterpillar pulls its brain backwards, out of its hard exoskeleton “skull.”

Detailed close-up images have caused some buzz in the entomological community, including a newly molted caterpillar inflating the spines that protect it from insect and bird predators, and caterpillars preparing for the chrysalid stage by shedding their skins and attaching themselves to twigs.

The survival of butterflies is tied to the survival of their “host plants.” Many butterfly caterpillars are adapted to eat only one species or variety of plant.

If a native plant loses ground to habitat destruction, the butterfly loses right along with it.

And, as speakers in the documentary note, modern gardening, particularly in public spaces like schoolyards and parks, often disdains butterfly food plants as “weedy” and undesirable, replacing them with plants that are “pretty” or “low maintenance” but entirely useless to native insects.

A few local butterflies have adapted, making the transition from one host plant to another.

For instance, those large yellow and black anise swallowtails that are some of the showiest butterflies in the East Bay used to live on native yampah, but now thrive on fennel, a ubiquitous “invasive” typically found in local vacant lots and along roadsides.

Throughout the film, common myths about butterflies are gently debunked.

For example the adult female, flitting from plant to plant, isn’t primarily looking for flower nectar to drink. That ranks a distant third, after finding a mate and suitable host plants on which to lay eggs.

The film presentation is very straightforward, with no fancy graphics, just a few subtitles and arrows to point out key features.

Some entomological humor creeps in through the section titles, including “Exoskeletons in the Closet” and “Extreme Makeovers” along with descriptions of adult butterfly mating rituals including what’s called “bar hopping.”

The narration is clear and simple, but doesn’t talk down to the viewer. A lot of technical terms pop up, from cremaster, to proleg, to instar, but are reasonably understandable in the context of the presentation.

This is truly a local documentary. Almost all of the filming was done in Oakland or Berkeley, much of it in the Willard neighborhood, with a few excursions to San Francisco, San Bruno Mountain, and the Antioch Dunes.

The latter two settings present discouraging scenes as butterfly seekers trudge by meadows overrun with invasive, butterfly-unfriendly, weeds and hillsides scraped down to bare earth to make way for new housing developments.

There are cameo appearances by locals including San Francisco environmental activist Barbara Deutsch and Jerry Powell, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley and a nationally known butterfly expert.

The film closes with encouragement to the viewer to “begin with the smallest steps in our own backyards” to help native butterflies survive.

Most important, this means planting some larval food plants, and keeping the garden free of chemical pesticides.

The narrator also notes that the “smallest plot of unused land, public or private, can often be a haven for butterflies.”

A narrow sideyard, the verge between curb and sidewalk, or a few feet along the edge of a school play yard, as at Le Conte Elementary in southeast Berkeley, can effectively serve this purpose.

In the Company of Wild Butterflies screens Saturday at 2 p.m. at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, with Bill and Sally Levinson present. Museum admission charge.

The UC Botanical Garden screens the film Tuesday, June 13, at 7 p.m. At 6 p.m. Sally Levinson, and local landscape and butterfly habitat designer Andy Liu who also consulted on the film, will lead evening tours of butterfly friendly plants in the garden. $10 general public, pre-registration required. For more information, see http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu.

The film may also be purchased or rented from Bullfrog Films, at www.bullfrogfilms.com.

Photograph by Steven Finacom

A West Coast Lady nectars on lantana, a good plant for generalized butterfly gardening.

In 1881, Irish-born playwright George H. Jessop wrote a minor comedy-drama titled Sam’l of Posen, the Commercial Drummer whose lead character, a shrewd Jewish peddler with a heart of gold, attains bourgeois respectability by means of little wiles interleaved with honesty.

The play might have gone nowhere but for a fortuitous pairing with the perfect actor, and both became roaring successes. The actor was Maurice B. Curtis (c. 1850–1920), born Mauritz Strelinger in Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

When Mauritz was a child, the Strelingers immigrated to Detroit, where his two younger brothers, Charles and George, were born. Mauritz’s father, Julian, owned a brewery that in 1893 would become Mutual Brewing Co. Mutual’s beer kegs carried the tagline “Pure & without drugs or poison.”

Mauritz may have picked up some of his father’s theatricality, for in 1870 he was already an actor. His level-headed brother Charles, on the other hand, entered the hardware business and went on to become president of Charles A. Strelinger Co., tools, supplies, and machinery.

Mauritz spent the years between 1870 and 1881 as a bit player, having acquired the stage name M.B. Curtis, which he would use in his personal life as well. The spectacular nationwide success of Sam’l of Posen made an entrepreneur of Curtis. He purchased the rights to the play and toured with it for years, often updating the plot and changing characters to keep it from going stale.

His touring eventually brought Curtis to San Francisco, where he developed a wide circle of acquaintance. It didn’t take long for him to appear in Berkeley, and not in a theatrical production. In 1887, he bought, then sold at a profit, land on the waterfront and on Dwight Way.

Caspar Thomas Hopkins was eager to unload 60 acres in Peralta Park that his California Insurance Company had acquired as collateral for a delinquent loan. Curtis snapped them up. At the same time, he purchased an undivided half interest in the adjoining John Schmidt farm and acquired additional lots from John F. Rooney.

The movers and shakers of Berkeley knew a good thing when they saw it and recruited Curtis to volunteer as President of the nascent Berkeley Electric Light Company. His fame helped raise funds. Mixing philanthropy with a sound marketing sense, Curtis gave Berkeley an elegant firehouse at Sixth Street and Bancroft Way, dedicated on Oct. 2, 1887 as Posen Chemical Station No. 1, after the evergreen play.

The actor’s promotional flair was also evident in Peralta Park. The subdivision map dated March 1, 1888, shows only three streets within the tract. Curtis and Posen avenues intersect in the north central portion (now part of Albany).

At the southwestern end, the short block of Albina Avenue runs from Hopkins Street to Codornices Creek. Albina De Mer was the stage name of Marie Alphonsine Strelinger, Curtis’s Canadian-born wife. A subsequent map, dated 1890, shows the new Fleurange Avenue (now Acton Street) to the west, and a year later Carlotta and Joseph avenues had been cut—all three streets named after actors or characters in Curtis’s productions.

Curtis planned an elegant subdivision anchored by a luxurious resort hotel. He organized the Peralta Park Hotel Company and began construction in 1888. In addition to its fantastic turreted exterior, the hotel boasted sixty bedrooms and twenty bathrooms—an unheard-of luxury. By 1889, construction was far along, and Curtis had his own house built at 1505 Hopkins Street (current site of the Immanuel Southern Baptist Church). It was erected by Lord & Boynton, builders, at a cost of $4,500.

The house, in Stick style with neo-Gothic elements, featured a prominent square tower with a tall, pointed roof. Behind the house was a barn with a water tank and mill on top of it. There was a chicken yard and a conservatory. Palms and umbrella trees alternated on the sidewalk, and four young eucalyptus trees festooned with ivy served as a green front gate. A grove of eucalyptus grew in the rear.

While construction was proceeding, Curtis talked the Claremont, University and Ferries Railway into running a branch horsecar line out Sacramento Street to Hopkins. He also organized a West Berkeley bank. To promote his play at the Bush Street Theatre, Curtis raffled lots in the paper town of Sam’l of Posen, western Tehama County, among the ticket buyers, then charged the winners a $2 recording fee.

The town was never built, and delinquent property tax bills for the nearly 10,000 lots mounted for almost half a century before the land was purchased at a discount and sold to a used car dealer who came up with the very same promo idea.

Curtis was riding high when on the night Sept. 10, 1891, he was caught in a bizarre incident in front of the Mission Street police station and accused of shooting Officer Alexander Grant to death. The scandal wreaked havoc with Curtis’s theatrical career and toppled his highly leveraged house of cards. Almost immediately, he sold his house with its contents to John H. Bolton.

Bolton’s son Arthur, who as an adolescent slept in the tower room, would in 1899 build his own house—a brown shingle—at 1700 La Loma Avenue on the Northside. An early member of the Hillside Club, Arthur Bolton would serve on the committee that designed the Hillside Club Street Improvements in the Daley’s Scenic Park tract, paying for the land surveying from his own pocket. He also planted a copse of redwoods on the corner of La Loma and Le Conte avenues.

In 1893, following a protracted murder trial, Maurice Curtis was found not guilty. By then he had lost most of his investments, including the Peralta Park Hotel, which was renamed Peralta Hall and became Colonel Homer B. Sprague’s School for Girls and later Dunn’s School for Boys.

In 1903, the Christian Brothers purchased the property and started what is now St. Mary’s College High School. A fire ravaged the turrets and superstructure in 1946, but the main floors continued to be used until 1959, when the building was demolished and replaced with a modern structure.

As for M.B. Curtis, the peripatetic actor continued touring with “Sam’l of Posen” and making deals. In 1893, he traded his Fresno ranch and vineyard for the Driskill Hotel in Austin, Texas. The hotel was sold at auction the following year.

In the late 1890s Curtis became a theatrical manager, founded the All Star Afro-American Minstrels, and for several years took companies on tour to New Zealand and Australia. Some of the artists he managed accused him of cheating and absconding.

In 1899, Curtis starred in a film about himself. The 1900 census found him and his wife in Berkeley again, but not for long. In 1910 Curtis portrayed his stock character in the movie “Samuel of Posen.” He ended his days a pauper in Los Angeles.

Although I am generally sympathetic with the varied plights of the home buyer, I have to admit, in all my curmugeonitude that I have no tears to shed for anyone in Berkeley that has to meet the requirement of our RECO ordinance.

No, I’m not talking organized crime (although I have more and more trouble distinguishing between government and organized crime as the days flow by—that’s RICO, Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations), but I date myself (and I had a very nice time too, thank you very much).

I’m talking about our Residential Energy Conservation Ordinance. When I look down the list of requirements that compliance entails, it’s just beyond me to feel anything other than pride and pleasure that we finally institutionalized some of the things that we were all talking about so passionately back in the ‘70s.

This is the rubber on the road and it’s nicely presented and fairly non-violent. There are even spending limits for every house that rough out to less than 1 percent (actually 0.75 percent) than the purchase price for a house. So when you buy your little bungalow for $700K (amazin’ ain’t it!) you won’t have to pay more than about five thousand dollars to comply.

Actually, a lot of the RECO jobs end up costing far less than that. It’s also something that only has to be done once per sale cycle and since RECO rules don’t change very fast, a house can actually change hands several times without having to do very much at all.

But none of these things are the thrust of my arguments in favor of RECO. They are the simple and vital care of the planet. If any of you haven’t yet seen Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, it’s time to rush out and see it. One thumb up from this reviewer.

We who live in the developed world should be doing all we possibly can to help reverse the harm we’re doing to our atmosphere and the RECO ordinance focuses almost exclusively on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from your house (or the power-plant that feeds your house) and it does so in the best possible way, by conserving the heat that you’ve already placed in your house.

In other words, it doesn’t force you to turn your heat down, your lights or your shower off after 5 minutes.

It just makes sure that these processes don’t liberate any more excess heat than is necessary. Furthermore, the benefits to you are more than spiritual—there are real financial benefits to be had as well.

A well-insulated house costs a lot less to heat and the cost of insulating your home is going to come right back to you in terms of our rapidly increasing PG&E bills.

So, when you complete your RECO checklist, you get to feel good about helping the earth, good about the cost savings you’ll experience and good about making some capital improvements in your house. So, what has to be done to comply?

First and foremost is attic insulation. Attics, when they meet accessibility requirements, have to be insulated to R-30. This can be done with blown-in cellulose (which I’m not crazy about), blown-in fiberglass, fiberglass batts (my favorite, especially when they’re fully surrounded with a plastic film) or any of the newer breed that’s coming down the pike including (no joke) recycled denim jeans (you get extra credit if your old lady embroidered ecology symbols on them first).

Insulating the attic is the prime expense in most RECO lists and it does a great deal of good by keeping the warmth inside the house.

You can do this job yourself but be cautious about the respiratory effects of dealing intimately with fiberglass or the detritus in your attic. A respirator is de-regeur, as well as long sleeve everything when doing this job.

The list also includes wrapping your water heater in a blanket (unless it’s inside the heated part of the house). The hot and cold pipes attached to this also need a little bit of insulation (2’ in each direction). Very simple. A damper is needed for your fireplace.

If you don’t have one, there are two relatively simple solutions. One is a damper installed at the top of the chimney (controlled by a cable that drops down into the fireplace), or a set of glass doors. The latter can be done by you, if you choose, but an expert might be the better choice for the former.

Toilets, showerheads and sink faucets need various restrictors to control excessive water use. These are all very simple and in most cases just require a little device to be screwed on, which lowers the use of water.

For showering this can be a bit of a hardship but a review of the best low-flow showerheads should result in at least one good choice. Toilets get dams to lower the amount of water (unless they are already 1.6 gallon types).

By the way, I’d like to say, for those of you who have had a bad experience with low-flow toilets that these have improved greatly in the last few years and the early models which failed to do the job on the first try have been replaced by ones that actually work.

The last things on the list are these: check your ducts for leaks and insulate them with at least R-3 (about 1” thick) insulation. This may mean no work at all if your system is relatively modern.

Next is insulation on a hot-water heating system (almost nobody has these and anyone who has an uninsulated hydronic system needs this anyway (and badly). Then there is the requirement to put flourescents in common areas on your multi-family common areas (the laundry room in the duplex).

This is super easy and it makes so much sense. I’ve got compact flourescents (free from Ranch 99!) in my laundry room and it’s just fine.

I don’t do much reading down there anyway and then I don’t have to yell at my kids when they leave the light on. The last one is exterior weather-stripping. This one matters a lot. Many exterior doors leak lots of heat and the small cost of this job has big returns.

When you think about this simple list of things to do, think about the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have already died in Iraq over a war which mightn’t have been fought at all if we didn’t feel that we needed all that oil. Also, think about the shrinking polar ice caps and planet your children will have to adopt from their foolish parents.

RECO is like a kindergarten course in the reduction of global warming. If you live in Berkeley and have to meet these regs, raise your head high and do it with pride.

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor, in care of East Bay Real Estate, at realestate@berkeleydailyplanet.com.

Broadway Terrace Nursery is a tad off my regular circuit, and it had been too long since I’d dropped in when I dashed there last Saturday. It was just before closing time—a good time to watch the staff get its collective mettle tested. I was as impressed as I’d been on the regrettably few occasions I’d visited before.

As I cruised around the tiny lot snapping photos, which I do by way of taking notes, I got one polite “Are you finding what you want?” from a staffer, but wasn’t sniffed after; these folks clearly don’t have Homeland Security ambitions. (Nursery folks are generally less paranoid than the usual retailer, in my experience.)

Mostly, they were busy with customers. I cocked an ear and heard lots of particular requests and helpful advice going on. “My situation is…,” earned a guided tour with specifics about preferences, tolerances, and ultimate sizes of the plants.

Well, that sounds more stiff than what I was listening to: lots of enthusiasm on both sides.

This is a boutique nursery, one that caters to a local clientele and uses knowledge of its needs and the area to infuse what’s clearly a very individual sense of style.

It’s been on the site for decades, through at least two owners, and has a comfort in its sense of place that allows for flights of imagination.

One thing that shows itself immediately is an interest in foliage color. “Of course,” a staffer told me, “almost everyone here has lots shade in their yards.” Foliage provides zing in shade where many plants won’t bloom, and adds to a gardener’s color palette.

Between the size of the place—it’s a fraction of a little pie-slice lot where two streets angle off into the Oakland hills—and all this foliage color, the place has a jewel-box dazzle.

I have a shady spot in the front yard that I’m stuffing with cannas and tropicals and heucheras (coral bells), and the last do very well there so I’ve been watching the market for heucheras for a few years now.

Several nurseries, including the Proven Winners/Proven Selections folks, have been having a good time with those: yellows, purples, purple-and-silvers, golds with red undersides, and hybrids with tiarellas (sugar scoops) called “heucherellas” that produce variegations and interesting leaf shapes.

It’s a bit like the effect the recent flowering of microbrews has on us beer-lovers.

Broadway Terrace has a couple of heuchera and heucherella cultivars that I hadn’t seen before. Someone’s watching that line carefully, along with other foliage delights.

There are also lots of variegated foliages: even a striking variegated red-top photinia, of all things, with green-and-cream leaves, blushing new growth, and an open habit that makes it a whole different plant to my eye.

It’d make a nifty focal shrub, with attentive pruning.

There are flowering plants, too, and trees, edibles, and a seed and tool collection—including a good assortment of Felco pruners—that rewards attentive browsing. Barn swallows nest in several spots in the shop’s eaves. Go give your eyes a treat.

Area governments say that 150,000 homes in the Bay Area are going to be uninhabitable after the Hayward Fault ruptures, the fault about which USGS seismologist Tom Brocher says, “It’s locked and loaded and ready to fire.”

How about it? No more denial, get your bids and get that retrofit done.

If you want to know more about retrofits and how they work, there’s a free seminar this Saturday morning, June 10, at 10 a.m. at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda, Berkeley.

It will cover the basics and make you knowledgeable about choosing a retrofit contractor.

A Red Cross survey found 80 percent of Bay area homeowners are not ready for a Big One. The retrofitted houses are the ones that will survive.

Larry Guillot is owner of QuakePrepare, an earthquake consulting, securing, and kit supply service in the east bay. www.quakeprepare.com

Pinole Community Players “Oliver!” the musical, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., selected Sun. at 2 p.m., at the Community Playhouse, 601 Tennent Ave., Pinole, through July 15. Tickets are $14-$17. 724-3669, 223-3598.

Swiss Cheese Sonata An evening of work by Pappas and Dancers, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., interactive family matinee Sun. at 2 p.m. at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St., at Telegraph, Oakland. Tickets are $10-$20 for the evenings, $7 for the interactive. 599-2325.

Chamber Music Sundaes, with members of the San Francisco Symphony and friends at 3:15 p.m. at St John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets at the door are $9-$21. 415-584-5946. www.chambermusicsundaes.org

The Trinity Lyric Opera company will perform the West Coast premiere of The Pilgrim’s Progress this weekend at the Dean Lesher Regional Arts Center in Walnut Creek.

The opera was one of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ last compositions and he considered it his masterpiece, the culmination of over 40 years of work.

Throughout his life he had composed parts of the piece, presenting some of them as finished work. At one point, thinking that he would never complete the opera, he folded several of its themes into his 5th Symphony. However, nearing his 80th year, Vaughan Williams finished the piece. In 1951, its presentation at Covent Garden in an inadequate and awkward production was “the bitterest disappointment of his musical life.”

Described as a “morality,” The Pilgrim’s Progress more closely resembles an oratorio with its large chorus, which acts as a central musical figure within the piece, and its lack of aria-driven action. It was conceived by the composer as a series of tableaux, like that of a medieval morality play.

But like all of Vaughan Williams’ music, it seems to be woven more of spirit and transcendence than of the didactic or moralistic. It took Vaughan Williams many years to develop his musical voice, and that development was sympathetically affected by his understanding of early English folk music. His is a spiritual music, but it is neither remote nor cold.

Vaughan Williams uses the John Bunyan allegory as the foundation for his opera not because he shared Bunyan’s religious beliefs but because the universalism of the allegory appealed to him.

“I want the idea,” he wrote to a friend, “to . . . appeal to anybody who aims at the spiritual life whether he is Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Shintoist, or 5th Day Adventist.”

According to his widow Ursula, Vaughan Williams was “an atheist . . . who drifted into a cheerful agnosticism: he was never a professing Christian.”

He was, however, a man with a deep social conscience. His work with refugees during the World War II led to the banning of his work by the Nazis.

Vaughan Williams stripped away much of Bunyan’s Radical Protestant ideology in The Pilgrim’s Progress, especially that concerned with the Christian struggle with sin. What remains is a simpler, more universal journey of the soul.

At the beginning of the opera, the character of Bunyan tells the audience of his dream, which is to become his book, and the Pilgrim enters the stage. He is driven by fear and the great burden he bears, and he cries out to be saved; The Evangelist sets him on a journey toward a light he can just see in the distance. Leaving his home, the City of Destruction, and heading toward the King’s Highway, Pilgrim finds himself at the House Beautiful, where he is relieved of his burden and given tokens to help him on his way. It is easy to read Vaughan Williams’ personal journey into to the voice of the Pilgrim when he sings: “Music in the house; music in the heart; music in heaven, for joy that I am here.”

The first trial that Pilgrim undergoes on his journey to the Celestial City is his battle with interior demons, represented by Apollyon and his minions, the Doleful Creatures. Apollyon, the Destroyer, is a form of the devil, the angel of the bottomless pit in Revelations, but here he takes on the form of feudal lord or property owner, who declares that the land and everything in it is his. After the battle in which he overcomes Apollyon, the Pilgrim is wounded and then healed by two bearers of Life, soprano and contralto, who comfort him in a sweetly ethereal duet.

His second trial takes place in Vanity Fair, where Pilgrim is confronted by the chaos of the marketplace, presided over by Lord Lechery singing a music-hall song. Gold, power, lust, pride of life are sold here, and when Pilgrim refuses to buy and rejects their patron god Beezlebub, he is thrown in jail and sentenced to die.

What follows is the opera’s most moving scene. In jail, Pilgrim is in despair, he feels abandoned by his god, but in the middle of these dark moments he remembers the key that he had been given in the House Beautiful. He realizes that he has been carrying his freedom with him, that he has the power to open the prison doors with which the material world has enclosed him. The doors swing open, and the Pilgrim returns to his journey.

It was clear in rehearsal last week that there are many fine singers in this production of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Jason Detwiler’s portrayal of the Pilgrim is especially wonderful, and in this prison scene it finds its most powerful realization. A fine bass-baritone, Detwiler has a voice with the weight and depth to give this scene the spiritual profundity it needs as his Pilgrim moves from black despair to radiant fulfillment.

The libretto of the prison scene is also one of the more beautiful sections of the opera; taken from the Bible, the language is that of mystical writing across many traditions: “Surely the darkness shall cover me even the night shall be light about me. The darkness is no darkness with thee: but the night shineth as the day.” It is the kind of language that Vaughan Williams could translate perfectly into music, melding it into his own contemplative sound, filled with ecstatic and mysterious harmonies.

Alan Thayer, the director of the Trinity Lyric Opera, founded and organized the company specifically to bring Ralph Vaughan Williams’ opera to the West Coast. This is a rare opportunity to hear an important work by one of the great composers of the 20th century.

THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

Trinity Lyric Opera’s production shows at 8 p.m. Friday, June 16, and Saturday, June 17, and 2 p.m. Sunday, June 18, at the Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek. For more information, see www.trinitylyricopera.org.

The Freight & Salvage Coffee House celebrates its 38th anniversary this Friday with a show that reflects the musical heritage and diversity that has long been its hallmark.

Friday’s lineup will feature Phil Marsh as host. Marsh will also perform as part of the Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band, the first act to play at the Freight & Salvage when it opened nearly four decades ago. Sharing the stage with Marsh will be local country blues singer David Jacobs-Strain, known for his bottleneck guitar prowess, Audrey Auld Mezera, who prefers to describe her country-tinged folk style as “music with the dirt left on,” and clown/violinist and Cirque du Soliel veteran Geoff Hoyle.

The diverse range of styles in the show reflects the wide variety of music that can be heard nightly at the Freight. Executive Director Steve Baker said his aim is “just try to put on a good show that people will enjoy.”

In 1968 the Freight was the only club of its kind in the Bay Area and has been instrumental in the cultivation of the now flourishing local traditional music scene, Baker said. Its influence can be seen in the proliferation of folk music venues in the greater Bay Area, including San Francisco’s ever-growing Not Strictly Bluegrass Festival.

The City of Berkeley is helping the club to purchase a new home in the downtown Arts District, which Baker hopes to move into by 2009.

With the inclusion of the Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band, the venue’s first performers, and more recent favorites such as Jacobs-Strain and Mezera, the Freight & Salvage Coffee House is celebrating its 38th anniversary with a nod to its past and a look towards its future.

FREIGHT & SALVAGE

38TH ANNIVERSARY SHOW

Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $16.50 in advance and $18.50 at the door and are available through TicketWeb at 866 468 3399 or at the Freight box office from noon to 7 p.m. at 1111 Addison Street. www.thefreight.org.

Bottlebrush trees are one of the bright, amusing notes on our streets, sporting those funny flowers shaped like, yes, bottlebrushes with perky little green-leaf tufts at their ends. They’re tough and not pest-prone, and easy enough to find in nurseries. Their hard little leaves and shreddy bark give them a ragamuffin air to match the spiky inflorescences. The red flowers attract birds—hummingbirds of course, but I’ve seen a stray Cape May warbler, a nectar-seeker in winter, using them too.

We’ve lost a few of the trees that I knew in North Berkeley, but enough of them are in gardens and public places than I don’t worry about a population decline. Besides, they’re exotics—from Australia—and as far as I know in no danger in their home range.

The bottlebrush—Callistemon—species I see here, mostly of the weeping (C. viminalis) or lemon (C. citrinus, formerly C. lanceolatus) sort, are among those trees that people ought to be planting under utility wires, because they generally don’t get very tall and it’s easy to control their height. They’re fun to prune.

In fact, my general complaint about local weeping bottlebrushes is that people don’t know how to prune them. Longtime readers of this column will not be surprised to hear that, as people who prune despite not knowing how are a frequent target of my uncharitable scorn. But weeping bottlebrush trees, especially, practically have roadmaps built in.

It’s easier to show you than to tell you, as Bre’r Rabbit would say, but here’s a first step: Don’t just shear them at the bottom in the equivalent of a bowl cut. Get underneath—after nesting season is over, please—and start cutting the branches closest to the trunk. They almost have “Cut Here” dotted lines; just cut on a leaf node, above a row of seedpods if there are any on the branch. For the first few, though, cut next to the trunk.

When you’ve opened those up a bit, stand and watch the tree. It should be a bit more flowing when it moves now, a bit bouncy but graceful. Cut a little more, still from the inside. Leave some deeper layers, but make them of uneven lengths.

When you have two forks in a twig, cut off the lower, inside one. This is counterintuitive only the first time, and is a good strategy with any weeping tree. Weepers should reach out a little, bounce like a waterfall; half their charm is in their motion in the breeze and their illusion of flowing even when still.

If you end up with something that looks like a parasol, stop. The tree will soon fill in some of the space, and you’ll be able to form your own ideas of what you and the tree can make happen next. Within whatever limits you have—traffic, the side of a building—try to broaden the reach of the tree, to let it move and dance and show off its flexibility.

There are two reasons for the opening-it-up strategy: Those inside branchlets are the ones that accumulate dirt, insects, mold, and such, and because they get less sun they’re less vigorous. Callistemons are tough, but there’s no need to stress the tree by making part of it a bug-and-pathogen farm. Also, they really aren’t supposed to look like bottlebrushes themselves: the common name refers to their startling, usually red, flowers.

Since the ones we see here are generally strictly ornamentals and generally small, it’s startling to read a quote from nineteenth-century handbook of Australian plants that recommends the wood of lemon bottlebrush for “ship-building and wheel-wright’s work and… mallets.”

But if you’ve ever had to cut one down, you’ve come to appreciate the toughness of the wood. The wood of some Callistemons is recommended for use in fenceposts and such things that come in contact with soil, because they resist rot. But mostly they’re ornamentals here. They’re tough enough to be used in hot places like parking lots, and their density is easily controlled so they make good screens of whatever opacity you like. I haven’t heard that they’re invasive, but if you live next to wildlands, check that out before planting one. Plant it high and don’t let it stand in water, and it’ll be good company.

Photograph by Ron Sullivan:

The exuberant flowers of weeping bottlebrush attract birds as varied as hummingbirds and Cape May warblers. This one is a street tree on Park Avenue in Oakland.

Return of the Over-the-Hills Gang Hikers 55 years and older who are interested in nature study, history, fitness, and fun are invited to join as we circumnavigate Round Top, one of the highest peaks in the Berkeley hills and a center of ancient volcanic activity. From 10 a.m. to noon. To register call 525-2233.

“Paws, Claws, Scales and Tales!” Albany Library Summer Reading Program begins. Children can pick up a game board and instuctions at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17.

Berkeley High School Site Council meets at 4:30 p.m. in Room D218 of the Admin building. The agenda includes 10th grade counseling (SB813), Site Plan Subcommittee report, School Governance Council Proposal. 525-0124.

Raging Grannies of the East Bay invites new folks to come join us from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. at Berkeley Gray Panthers, 1403 Addison St., in Andronico’s mall. 548-9696.

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991.

Parking and Traffic around Solano Ave. Andronico’s A Community Meeting at 7 p.m. at Thousand Oaks School Multi-purpose Room, on Colusa. For information call Councilmember Capitelli, 981-7150.

Walking Tour of Old Oakland uptown to the Lake to discover Art Deco landmarks. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of the Paramount Theater at 2025 Broadway. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234.

East Bay Genealogical Society with Caroline Earhart on her family quilt “My Family’s Road to California” at 10 a.m. in the Library Conference Room of the Family History Center, 4766 Lincoln Ave. Oakland. All welcome. 635-6692.

Celebrate Flag Day at Habitot by creating a giant community flag from 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 2065 Kittredge St. Cost is $5-$6. 647-1111.

“Girl, I’ve Been Through A Lot...” Poetry workshop for girls age 13 to 17 at 4 p.m. at Oakland Public Library, Room 219, 125 14th St. 238-3134.

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. 548-9840.

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6:30 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704.

Jewish Community Federation of the Greater East Bay Annual Meeting at 6:30 p.m. at Congregation Beth El, 1301 Oxford St.

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at 6:30 p.m. at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. www.geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil

THURSDAY, JUNE 15

Family Day at UC Botanical Garden with hands-on activities from 10 a.m. to noon at 200 Centennial Drive. Cost for one parent and one child is $14-$18. Additional adult or children per family are $7 each. Registration required. 643-2755.

Embracing Diversity Films “Out of the Shadow” a documentary of a woman with paranoid schizophrenia, at 7 p.m. at Albany High School Library, 603 Key Route Blvd. Please enter through gym doors on Thousand Oaks Blvd. Suitable for children over 12. Free. Discussion follows. 527-1328.

LeConte Neighborhood Association meets at 7:30 p.m. in the LeConte School Cafeteria, Russell St. entrance. The agenda includes the proposed cell phone antennas at the former Bekins’ Building and Ashby Bart development plans. 843-2602.

“Oakland Unified School District: A Tale of Two Schools” A discussion of teacher spending gaps and other OUSD issues at the Metropolitan Greater Oakland Democratic Club at 7 p.m. at Piedmont Gardens, 110 41st Ave. 834-9198.

FRIDAY, JUNE 16

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with a panel discussion on “Are the Traditional Ethics of Established Religion Outmoded?” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $13.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925 or 665-9020.

Conscientious Projector: “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” A documentary film by Alex Gibney at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship Hall, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. Donations accepted. 528-5403.

The Feng Shui of Sacred Land, Sacred Architecture A slide show and talk with Eva Wong at 8 p.m. at the Berkeley Shambhala Meditation Center, 2288 Fulton St. at Bancroft. Cost is $20 at door. 841-3242.

Berkeley Chess School classes for students in grades 1-8 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. A drop-in, rated scholastic tournament follows from 7 to 8 p.m. at 1581 LeRoy Ave., Room 17. 843-0150.

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 8 p.m. at the East Bay Chess Club, 1940 Virginia St. Players at all levels are welcome. 845-1041.

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. 845-1143.

SATURDAY, JUNE 17

Downtown Berkeley Visioning Workshop from 1 to 4 p.m. at Berkeley High School Library. The public is invited to attend and comment. 981-7487.

Temescal Street Fair from noon to 6 p.m. on Telegraph Ave. between 51st and 48th with food from local restaurants, performances, childrens’ activities. www.temescalmerchants.com

“A Holistic Approach to Healthy Challenges We All Face” A community converstion on mental health and wellness at The Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church in Oakland. Free, but registration required. 763-9523. staff@thetraininginstitute.org

Giant Yard and Bake Sale to benefit the animals of the Berkeley Animal Shelter, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 1257 Hopkins St. http://share4shelter.org

KPFA Yard Sale from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the KPFA parking lot on Berkeley Way at Martin Luther King Jr. Way.

Don’t be Rattled Learn the myths and facts about rattlesnakes at 10:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233.

Kid’s Garden Club for ages 7-12 to explore the world of gardening, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 636-1684.

Berkeley Garden Club Plant Sale from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 547 Grizzly Peak Blvd, top of Euclid. 524-7296.

Juneteeth Celebration in Richmond from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Nicholl Park, MacDonald Ave. and 32nd St. Sponsored by the National Brotherhood Alliance and the City of Richmond. 620-6516.

Walking Tour of Oakland City Center Meet at 10 a.m. in front Oakland City Hall at Frank Ogawa Plaza. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234.

African American Women’s Health A community forum on a holistic approach to health and other issues, with speakers, resources and local service providers, from noon to 5 p.m. at Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church, 3534 Lakeshore Ave. Free, but RSVP’s appreciated. 763-9523.

West Stege Marsh Restoration Volunteers are needed to assist with the on-going effort to restore a portion of West Stege marsh, its surrounding uplands, and adjacent grassland, on UC’s Richmond Field Station, from 9 a.m. to noon. To register and for directions call. 665-3689. www.thewatershedproject.org

“Towards an Sustainable Oakland” with Mose Durst, senior director of the Global Economics Action Institute, at 2 p.m. at the Oakland Public Library, Rockridge Branch, 5366 College Ave. 597-5017.

Pre-School Storytime for 3-5 year olds at 11 a.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., through June 22. 526-3720, ext. 17.

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755.

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552.

SUNDAY, JUNE 18

Juneteenth Festival, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Adeline and Alcatraz. 655-8008.

Father’s Day Pancake Breakfast from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on board The Red Oak Victory Ship in Richmond harbor, 1337 Canal Blvd. Take HY 580 and exit at Canal Blvd. Cost is $6, children under 5 free. A tour of the ship is included. 237-2933.

Father’s Day Dragon Boat Adventure from 9 a.m. to noon at the Berkeley Marina. Sign up to ride in a Chinese river boat. Cost is $25, free to Save the Bay members. 452-9261 ext. 109. www.savesfbay.org/bayevents

Name that Snake Learn to identify the snakes that live in your backyard and local parks at 12:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233.

Free Hands-on Bicycle Clinic Learn how to repair a flat, from 10 to 11 a.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140.

Bike Tour of Oakland Explore Oakland and learn about its incredible history its visionaries and scoundrels—who were often the same people. The leisurely two-hour tours are about five miles long, with no hills. Meet at 10 a.m. at the 10th St. entrance of the Oakland Museum of California. Participants must be over twelve years old and provide their own bikes, helmets and repair kits. Free, but reservations required. 238-3514.

“Come Spot Come” Teach your dog to come when called, no matter what the distraction, from 3 to 4 p.m. at Grace North Church, 2128 Cedar St. Cost is $35, registration required. 849-9323. companyofdogs.com

Tree Identification Walk Take a short walk around and learn about some of our native nad non-native trees at 2 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233.

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712.

Sunday Summer Forum: Towards a More Just World with Loni Hancock, State Assemblymember on Reforming Campaing Financing, at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306.

East Bay Open Studios Sat. and Sun. For maps and times see www.proartsgallery.org

FILM

Against Indifference: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski “Three Colors: Blue” at 8:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.

READINGS AND LECTURES

Rhythm and Muse “In Celebration of Swimming” spoken word and music at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. in Live Oak Park. Donations appreciated. Benefits public pool use for homeless and low-income youth. 644-6893.

J. Othello will read from and discuss his book “The Soul of Rock ‘N Roll: A History of African Americans in Rock Music” at 2 p.m. at the Oakland Public Library, West Auditorium, 125 14th St. 238-3134.

Alexander Polikoff describes “Waiting for Gautreaux: A Story of Segregation, Housing, and the Black Ghetto” at 4:30 p.m. at at Cody’s Books on Telegraph. 845-7852.

Sean Wilsey explains “The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup: 32 Writers on 32 Countries” at 7:30 p.m. at at Cody’s Books on Telegraph. 845-7852.

Circus Clowning A showcase by the students of the Clown Conservatory at Circus Center at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $7.50 children, $12.50 adults. 925-798-1300.

Bill Buford describes “Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Salve, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St.

MUSIC AND DANCE

The “Farewell” Consort to celebrate Pastor Jim Stickney’s many years of support for early music at 7:30 p.m. at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, 1501 Washington Ave., Albany. Suggested donation $10-$1. 525-1716.

This weekend as part of the San Francisco Jazz Festival, the Herbst Theatre will feature tap dancer extraordinaire Savion Glover on Saturday and Latin saxophone and clarinet virtuoso Paquito D’Rivera on Sunday.

Savion Glover

Tap dance is a quintessentially American art form, the dance analog to instrumental jazz. The roots of tap go back at least to the cakewalk of the 1890s, but when sound film entered the scene in 1929, fans all over the world had a chance to see and hear the great tappers do astounding feats with their astounding feets.

Bill “Bojangles” Robinson danced up and down a flight of steps just on his toes. John Bubbles added heel taps to create rhythm tap. Dancers like Honi Coles and Cholly Atkins, who followed up on Bubbles innovations, were just as suave and sophisticated as Astaire and Kelly.

Eventually, Cholly became the choreographer for all the Motown groups. The Nicholas Brothers added acrobatics. By the Forties, when Bird and Diz were inventing bebop, dancers like Baby Lawrence and Bunny Briggs followed their lead and invented paddle and roll, a step that fit with the new rhythms.

Today we have Savion Glover who has bundled up all the steps and styles of the past and carried them into the present.

Nothing of the past has been lost, but something brand new has been added. Savion is the greatest living tap dancer because he is the most innovative and contemporary.

The last time he was in the area, at the Marin Center Veterans Memorial Auditorium in November, he presented a program of tapping to the classics. This could easily have been effete, but Savion had me convinced during Mozart’s Divertimento in D major, that he was right and everyone else had missed Mozart’s rhythmic and percussive genius.

His own rhythmic and percussive genius along with remarkable grace, energy and improvisational genius are not to be missed.

Paquito D’Rivera

Alto saxophonist and clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera was born in Cuba in 1948. In fact he celebrated his 58th birthday just this week on June 4.

As a child prodigy in his native Cuba he often played with the Cuban National Symphony Orchestra, sometimes premiering works by top Cuban composers. His father, a tenor saxophonist, introduced him to jazz and he learned more from the radio show “Willis Conover Jazz Hour” which was broadcast to Cuba by the Voice of America.

Curiously, the Voice of America was barred by law from broadcasting in the United States, so Conover’s show, arguably the best jazz programming ever broadcast on radio, had a tremendous impact outside of the United States while we suffered here with very little decent jazz radio at that time. Paquito was a founding member of the Orquesta Cubana de Musica Moderna. He went on to be a founding member of Irakere in 1973.

The group also included such future stars as trumpeter Arturo Sandoval and pianist Chucho Valdes. After defecting in 1980, Paquito moved to New York and was soon playing with Dizzy Gillespie, a musician who adored Cuban music and was adored in Cuba. Paquito, who brings his quintet to the festival, is certainly the greatest Latin alto player of all time, combining Cuban roots, bebop and his own personal lyricism.

Savion Glover presents two shows on Saturday, June 10, at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m., at Herbst Theatre, San Francisco.

On the following night, Sunday, June 11, at 7 p.m., Paquito D’Rivera brings his quintet to Herbst Theatre.

For more information call 415-788-7353 or visit their website at sfjazz.org.

In any of Shakespeare’s comedies, some of the “low” characters are usually referred to as clowns. In CalShake’s new production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, there’s a different generic term for funnymen and women: puppets.

And they’re puppets of all sizes, from the “weathercock” messenger Robin, fluttering above the heads of actors, fellow puppets and audience, to Pistol, shaped eponymously like a swaggering blunderbuss, to that character Orson Welles referred to as The Bard’s greatest creation, great in girth, forgivable faults and “only deliberately a clown,” symbol of the Merrie Olde England already waning by Tudor times: Sir John Falstaff, here a veritable blimp, worthy of being a float in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

The story of Merry Wives is simple, yet the plot’s filled with amorous and domestic complications. Like a Chinese box puzzle, the play must dismantle itself before it’s clear who’s fooling who.

However, everybody seems to trick Falstaff, who lumbers along good naturedly at the center of things, heaped with abuse, derision and laughter for the foibles of his vanity. Funnyman Ron Campbell is encased in the huge, billowing frame of the Falstaff zeppelin, characteristically muttering countless asides to himself, and finally emerging in a lather at curtain call.

The biggest go-around is Falstaff’s burlesque wooing of the Merry Wives themselves, Mistresses Page and Ford (Catherine Castellanos and Delia MacDougall), thinking to gain both love and money (to fuel his profligate roistering) by divide-and-conquer tactics.

The wives’ own counter-plot leads the grand buffoon on as does the botched counterintelligence of jealous Master Ford (Anthony Fusco) who alternately goads on Falstaff while in disguise and roars in vengefully to catch him in flagrante, only to come up empty-handed. All the while, Falstaff is consigned to various ignoble—and painful—backdoor exits as dirty linen and in elephantine drag, always in the nick of time.

The final indignity to Sir John proves to be a group masquerade, in which fantastic spirits haze the butt of so many jokes, who, finally wised up, exclaims, “I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass.”

A great deal of the fun of this version is got by the effects of live actors relating to puppet, in particular, Delia MacDougall and Anthony Fusco (who plays Master Ford with all the stops out, more cartoon character from Fractured Fairy Tales than either clown or puppet, in a hilarious performance of manic virtuosity). This develops a rhythm all its own that interweaves with the plot and the outlandish chatter issuing from the puppets of all shapes and sizes.

Danny Sheie and Lorna Howley lend their voices particularly well to their animate charges, though the cookie-cutter cruciform Welsh preacher Hugh Evans veers between Scots and Swedish more than cymrophone, dandling a rosary and crucifix suspicious in Elizabethan hands.

John Ludwig, Chris Brown and Jason Hines have come up with quite a brood of puppets, which both clash and blend in with their human brethren under Sean Daniels’ direction.

Despite its declaration of a proud puppet geneology leading back to the Puritan closing of the theaters and resultant Shakespeare Fests, there are moments when the proceedings seem more like a Vegas floor show with Muppet knock-offs. Neither are the Elizabethan “vagaries of falling in love, and tensions within marriage as an institution” explored or revealed comically, in particular, as resident dramaturg Laura Hope artfully expounds in the program, stitching the season’s plays thematically together.

But the real accent is on fun for everyone, a carefree opener for the season under the summer sky in the hills outside Orinda. For that, the show goes over like a ton of bricks, as intended.

Not only must butterflies go through repeated and incredible physical changes to reach adulthood, but at every stage they’re beset by predators and threats from the weather, chemicals and pesticides, lack of suitable food, and encroachment on habitat by humans and invasive plants.

A new film, directed and produced in the Bay Area by Oaklander Bill Levinson, provides a provocative and visually rich look at the familiar insects and the cycles of their lives.

In The Company of Wild Butterflies can be seen locally this Saturday in San Francisco or next Tuesday, June 13, along with a special tour at the UC Botanical Garden (See sidebar).

Levinson, who has other documentary film work to his credit, became fascinated with butterflies at the Berkeley garden of his sister, UC-trained Sally Levinson, who characterizes herself as a “consulting entomologist.”

He began to film, up close, the habits and transformations of the wild butterflies she welcomes to her yard and often raises indoors during their pre-flight stages.

The result, with the expert assistance of his sister and others, is a sympathetic and engaging documentary illuminating the multiple lives of butterflies and what they need to survive and co-exist in a world dominated by humans.

It’s likely that no other creature with which humans come in regular contact goes through such complex change as the butterfly. It experiences four distinctively different stages of life: egg, larva, chrysalid, and winged adult.

The changes are startling in form and scale. The film notes that if a human infant grew as fast as a caterpillar, it would achieve not only adulthood, but some ten tons in added weight, within a few weeks.

The core and exotic beauty of the documentary is the presentation of the butterfly life cycle, shifting back and forth between various locally familiar species, including fawn brown buckeyes, yellow and black anise swallowtails, orange and black painted ladies, orange and silver fritillaries, cabbage whites, and monarchs.

Amazing transformational moments are detailed on film, from tiny, translucent, caterpillars chewing their way out of egg shells, to an older growing, caterpillar molting off its tight skin, to the adult butterfly emerging from its chrysalid case.

The film is most engaging and informative in capturing the nuances of each stage. For example, the molting caterpillar pulls its brain backwards, out of its hard exoskeleton “skull.”

Detailed close-up images have caused some buzz in the entomological community, including a newly molted caterpillar inflating the spines that protect it from insect and bird predators, and caterpillars preparing for the chrysalid stage by shedding their skins and attaching themselves to twigs.

The survival of butterflies is tied to the survival of their “host plants.” Many butterfly caterpillars are adapted to eat only one species or variety of plant.

If a native plant loses ground to habitat destruction, the butterfly loses right along with it.

And, as speakers in the documentary note, modern gardening, particularly in public spaces like schoolyards and parks, often disdains butterfly food plants as “weedy” and undesirable, replacing them with plants that are “pretty” or “low maintenance” but entirely useless to native insects.

A few local butterflies have adapted, making the transition from one host plant to another.

For instance, those large yellow and black anise swallowtails that are some of the showiest butterflies in the East Bay used to live on native yampah, but now thrive on fennel, a ubiquitous “invasive” typically found in local vacant lots and along roadsides.

Throughout the film, common myths about butterflies are gently debunked.

For example the adult female, flitting from plant to plant, isn’t primarily looking for flower nectar to drink. That ranks a distant third, after finding a mate and suitable host plants on which to lay eggs.

The film presentation is very straightforward, with no fancy graphics, just a few subtitles and arrows to point out key features.

Some entomological humor creeps in through the section titles, including “Exoskeletons in the Closet” and “Extreme Makeovers” along with descriptions of adult butterfly mating rituals including what’s called “bar hopping.”

The narration is clear and simple, but doesn’t talk down to the viewer. A lot of technical terms pop up, from cremaster, to proleg, to instar, but are reasonably understandable in the context of the presentation.

This is truly a local documentary. Almost all of the filming was done in Oakland or Berkeley, much of it in the Willard neighborhood, with a few excursions to San Francisco, San Bruno Mountain, and the Antioch Dunes.

The latter two settings present discouraging scenes as butterfly seekers trudge by meadows overrun with invasive, butterfly-unfriendly, weeds and hillsides scraped down to bare earth to make way for new housing developments.

There are cameo appearances by locals including San Francisco environmental activist Barbara Deutsch and Jerry Powell, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley and a nationally known butterfly expert.

The film closes with encouragement to the viewer to “begin with the smallest steps in our own backyards” to help native butterflies survive.

Most important, this means planting some larval food plants, and keeping the garden free of chemical pesticides.

The narrator also notes that the “smallest plot of unused land, public or private, can often be a haven for butterflies.”

A narrow sideyard, the verge between curb and sidewalk, or a few feet along the edge of a school play yard, as at Le Conte Elementary in southeast Berkeley, can effectively serve this purpose.

In the Company of Wild Butterflies screens Saturday at 2 p.m. at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, with Bill and Sally Levinson present. Museum admission charge.

The UC Botanical Garden screens the film Tuesday, June 13, at 7 p.m. At 6 p.m. Sally Levinson, and local landscape and butterfly habitat designer Andy Liu who also consulted on the film, will lead evening tours of butterfly friendly plants in the garden. $10 general public, pre-registration required. For more information, see http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu.

The film may also be purchased or rented from Bullfrog Films, at www.bullfrogfilms.com.

Photograph by Steven Finacom

A West Coast Lady nectars on lantana, a good plant for generalized butterfly gardening.

In 1881, Irish-born playwright George H. Jessop wrote a minor comedy-drama titled Sam’l of Posen, the Commercial Drummer whose lead character, a shrewd Jewish peddler with a heart of gold, attains bourgeois respectability by means of little wiles interleaved with honesty.

The play might have gone nowhere but for a fortuitous pairing with the perfect actor, and both became roaring successes. The actor was Maurice B. Curtis (c. 1850–1920), born Mauritz Strelinger in Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

When Mauritz was a child, the Strelingers immigrated to Detroit, where his two younger brothers, Charles and George, were born. Mauritz’s father, Julian, owned a brewery that in 1893 would become Mutual Brewing Co. Mutual’s beer kegs carried the tagline “Pure & without drugs or poison.”

Mauritz may have picked up some of his father’s theatricality, for in 1870 he was already an actor. His level-headed brother Charles, on the other hand, entered the hardware business and went on to become president of Charles A. Strelinger Co., tools, supplies, and machinery.

Mauritz spent the years between 1870 and 1881 as a bit player, having acquired the stage name M.B. Curtis, which he would use in his personal life as well. The spectacular nationwide success of Sam’l of Posen made an entrepreneur of Curtis. He purchased the rights to the play and toured with it for years, often updating the plot and changing characters to keep it from going stale.

His touring eventually brought Curtis to San Francisco, where he developed a wide circle of acquaintance. It didn’t take long for him to appear in Berkeley, and not in a theatrical production. In 1887, he bought, then sold at a profit, land on the waterfront and on Dwight Way.

Caspar Thomas Hopkins was eager to unload 60 acres in Peralta Park that his California Insurance Company had acquired as collateral for a delinquent loan. Curtis snapped them up. At the same time, he purchased an undivided half interest in the adjoining John Schmidt farm and acquired additional lots from John F. Rooney.

The movers and shakers of Berkeley knew a good thing when they saw it and recruited Curtis to volunteer as President of the nascent Berkeley Electric Light Company. His fame helped raise funds. Mixing philanthropy with a sound marketing sense, Curtis gave Berkeley an elegant firehouse at Sixth Street and Bancroft Way, dedicated on Oct. 2, 1887 as Posen Chemical Station No. 1, after the evergreen play.

The actor’s promotional flair was also evident in Peralta Park. The subdivision map dated March 1, 1888, shows only three streets within the tract. Curtis and Posen avenues intersect in the north central portion (now part of Albany).

At the southwestern end, the short block of Albina Avenue runs from Hopkins Street to Codornices Creek. Albina De Mer was the stage name of Marie Alphonsine Strelinger, Curtis’s Canadian-born wife. A subsequent map, dated 1890, shows the new Fleurange Avenue (now Acton Street) to the west, and a year later Carlotta and Joseph avenues had been cut—all three streets named after actors or characters in Curtis’s productions.

Curtis planned an elegant subdivision anchored by a luxurious resort hotel. He organized the Peralta Park Hotel Company and began construction in 1888. In addition to its fantastic turreted exterior, the hotel boasted sixty bedrooms and twenty bathrooms—an unheard-of luxury. By 1889, construction was far along, and Curtis had his own house built at 1505 Hopkins Street (current site of the Immanuel Southern Baptist Church). It was erected by Lord & Boynton, builders, at a cost of $4,500.

The house, in Stick style with neo-Gothic elements, featured a prominent square tower with a tall, pointed roof. Behind the house was a barn with a water tank and mill on top of it. There was a chicken yard and a conservatory. Palms and umbrella trees alternated on the sidewalk, and four young eucalyptus trees festooned with ivy served as a green front gate. A grove of eucalyptus grew in the rear.

While construction was proceeding, Curtis talked the Claremont, University and Ferries Railway into running a branch horsecar line out Sacramento Street to Hopkins. He also organized a West Berkeley bank. To promote his play at the Bush Street Theatre, Curtis raffled lots in the paper town of Sam’l of Posen, western Tehama County, among the ticket buyers, then charged the winners a $2 recording fee.

The town was never built, and delinquent property tax bills for the nearly 10,000 lots mounted for almost half a century before the land was purchased at a discount and sold to a used car dealer who came up with the very same promo idea.

Curtis was riding high when on the night Sept. 10, 1891, he was caught in a bizarre incident in front of the Mission Street police station and accused of shooting Officer Alexander Grant to death. The scandal wreaked havoc with Curtis’s theatrical career and toppled his highly leveraged house of cards. Almost immediately, he sold his house with its contents to John H. Bolton.

Bolton’s son Arthur, who as an adolescent slept in the tower room, would in 1899 build his own house—a brown shingle—at 1700 La Loma Avenue on the Northside. An early member of the Hillside Club, Arthur Bolton would serve on the committee that designed the Hillside Club Street Improvements in the Daley’s Scenic Park tract, paying for the land surveying from his own pocket. He also planted a copse of redwoods on the corner of La Loma and Le Conte avenues.

In 1893, following a protracted murder trial, Maurice Curtis was found not guilty. By then he had lost most of his investments, including the Peralta Park Hotel, which was renamed Peralta Hall and became Colonel Homer B. Sprague’s School for Girls and later Dunn’s School for Boys.

In 1903, the Christian Brothers purchased the property and started what is now St. Mary’s College High School. A fire ravaged the turrets and superstructure in 1946, but the main floors continued to be used until 1959, when the building was demolished and replaced with a modern structure.

As for M.B. Curtis, the peripatetic actor continued touring with “Sam’l of Posen” and making deals. In 1893, he traded his Fresno ranch and vineyard for the Driskill Hotel in Austin, Texas. The hotel was sold at auction the following year.

In the late 1890s Curtis became a theatrical manager, founded the All Star Afro-American Minstrels, and for several years took companies on tour to New Zealand and Australia. Some of the artists he managed accused him of cheating and absconding.

In 1899, Curtis starred in a film about himself. The 1900 census found him and his wife in Berkeley again, but not for long. In 1910 Curtis portrayed his stock character in the movie “Samuel of Posen.” He ended his days a pauper in Los Angeles.

Although I am generally sympathetic with the varied plights of the home buyer, I have to admit, in all my curmugeonitude that I have no tears to shed for anyone in Berkeley that has to meet the requirement of our RECO ordinance.

No, I’m not talking organized crime (although I have more and more trouble distinguishing between government and organized crime as the days flow by—that’s RICO, Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations), but I date myself (and I had a very nice time too, thank you very much).

I’m talking about our Residential Energy Conservation Ordinance. When I look down the list of requirements that compliance entails, it’s just beyond me to feel anything other than pride and pleasure that we finally institutionalized some of the things that we were all talking about so passionately back in the ‘70s.

This is the rubber on the road and it’s nicely presented and fairly non-violent. There are even spending limits for every house that rough out to less than 1 percent (actually 0.75 percent) than the purchase price for a house. So when you buy your little bungalow for $700K (amazin’ ain’t it!) you won’t have to pay more than about five thousand dollars to comply.

Actually, a lot of the RECO jobs end up costing far less than that. It’s also something that only has to be done once per sale cycle and since RECO rules don’t change very fast, a house can actually change hands several times without having to do very much at all.

But none of these things are the thrust of my arguments in favor of RECO. They are the simple and vital care of the planet. If any of you haven’t yet seen Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, it’s time to rush out and see it. One thumb up from this reviewer.

We who live in the developed world should be doing all we possibly can to help reverse the harm we’re doing to our atmosphere and the RECO ordinance focuses almost exclusively on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from your house (or the power-plant that feeds your house) and it does so in the best possible way, by conserving the heat that you’ve already placed in your house.

In other words, it doesn’t force you to turn your heat down, your lights or your shower off after 5 minutes.

It just makes sure that these processes don’t liberate any more excess heat than is necessary. Furthermore, the benefits to you are more than spiritual—there are real financial benefits to be had as well.

A well-insulated house costs a lot less to heat and the cost of insulating your home is going to come right back to you in terms of our rapidly increasing PG&E bills.

So, when you complete your RECO checklist, you get to feel good about helping the earth, good about the cost savings you’ll experience and good about making some capital improvements in your house. So, what has to be done to comply?

First and foremost is attic insulation. Attics, when they meet accessibility requirements, have to be insulated to R-30. This can be done with blown-in cellulose (which I’m not crazy about), blown-in fiberglass, fiberglass batts (my favorite, especially when they’re fully surrounded with a plastic film) or any of the newer breed that’s coming down the pike including (no joke) recycled denim jeans (you get extra credit if your old lady embroidered ecology symbols on them first).

Insulating the attic is the prime expense in most RECO lists and it does a great deal of good by keeping the warmth inside the house.

You can do this job yourself but be cautious about the respiratory effects of dealing intimately with fiberglass or the detritus in your attic. A respirator is de-regeur, as well as long sleeve everything when doing this job.

The list also includes wrapping your water heater in a blanket (unless it’s inside the heated part of the house). The hot and cold pipes attached to this also need a little bit of insulation (2’ in each direction). Very simple. A damper is needed for your fireplace.

If you don’t have one, there are two relatively simple solutions. One is a damper installed at the top of the chimney (controlled by a cable that drops down into the fireplace), or a set of glass doors. The latter can be done by you, if you choose, but an expert might be the better choice for the former.

Toilets, showerheads and sink faucets need various restrictors to control excessive water use. These are all very simple and in most cases just require a little device to be screwed on, which lowers the use of water.

For showering this can be a bit of a hardship but a review of the best low-flow showerheads should result in at least one good choice. Toilets get dams to lower the amount of water (unless they are already 1.6 gallon types).

By the way, I’d like to say, for those of you who have had a bad experience with low-flow toilets that these have improved greatly in the last few years and the early models which failed to do the job on the first try have been replaced by ones that actually work.

The last things on the list are these: check your ducts for leaks and insulate them with at least R-3 (about 1” thick) insulation. This may mean no work at all if your system is relatively modern.

Next is insulation on a hot-water heating system (almost nobody has these and anyone who has an uninsulated hydronic system needs this anyway (and badly). Then there is the requirement to put flourescents in common areas on your multi-family common areas (the laundry room in the duplex).

This is super easy and it makes so much sense. I’ve got compact flourescents (free from Ranch 99!) in my laundry room and it’s just fine.

I don’t do much reading down there anyway and then I don’t have to yell at my kids when they leave the light on. The last one is exterior weather-stripping. This one matters a lot. Many exterior doors leak lots of heat and the small cost of this job has big returns.

When you think about this simple list of things to do, think about the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have already died in Iraq over a war which mightn’t have been fought at all if we didn’t feel that we needed all that oil. Also, think about the shrinking polar ice caps and planet your children will have to adopt from their foolish parents.

RECO is like a kindergarten course in the reduction of global warming. If you live in Berkeley and have to meet these regs, raise your head high and do it with pride.

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor, in care of East Bay Real Estate, at realestate@berkeleydailyplanet.com.

Broadway Terrace Nursery is a tad off my regular circuit, and it had been too long since I’d dropped in when I dashed there last Saturday. It was just before closing time—a good time to watch the staff get its collective mettle tested. I was as impressed as I’d been on the regrettably few occasions I’d visited before.

As I cruised around the tiny lot snapping photos, which I do by way of taking notes, I got one polite “Are you finding what you want?” from a staffer, but wasn’t sniffed after; these folks clearly don’t have Homeland Security ambitions. (Nursery folks are generally less paranoid than the usual retailer, in my experience.)

Mostly, they were busy with customers. I cocked an ear and heard lots of particular requests and helpful advice going on. “My situation is…,” earned a guided tour with specifics about preferences, tolerances, and ultimate sizes of the plants.

Well, that sounds more stiff than what I was listening to: lots of enthusiasm on both sides.

This is a boutique nursery, one that caters to a local clientele and uses knowledge of its needs and the area to infuse what’s clearly a very individual sense of style.

It’s been on the site for decades, through at least two owners, and has a comfort in its sense of place that allows for flights of imagination.

One thing that shows itself immediately is an interest in foliage color. “Of course,” a staffer told me, “almost everyone here has lots shade in their yards.” Foliage provides zing in shade where many plants won’t bloom, and adds to a gardener’s color palette.

Between the size of the place—it’s a fraction of a little pie-slice lot where two streets angle off into the Oakland hills—and all this foliage color, the place has a jewel-box dazzle.

I have a shady spot in the front yard that I’m stuffing with cannas and tropicals and heucheras (coral bells), and the last do very well there so I’ve been watching the market for heucheras for a few years now.

Several nurseries, including the Proven Winners/Proven Selections folks, have been having a good time with those: yellows, purples, purple-and-silvers, golds with red undersides, and hybrids with tiarellas (sugar scoops) called “heucherellas” that produce variegations and interesting leaf shapes.

It’s a bit like the effect the recent flowering of microbrews has on us beer-lovers.

Broadway Terrace has a couple of heuchera and heucherella cultivars that I hadn’t seen before. Someone’s watching that line carefully, along with other foliage delights.

There are also lots of variegated foliages: even a striking variegated red-top photinia, of all things, with green-and-cream leaves, blushing new growth, and an open habit that makes it a whole different plant to my eye.

It’d make a nifty focal shrub, with attentive pruning.

There are flowering plants, too, and trees, edibles, and a seed and tool collection—including a good assortment of Felco pruners—that rewards attentive browsing. Barn swallows nest in several spots in the shop’s eaves. Go give your eyes a treat.

Area governments say that 150,000 homes in the Bay Area are going to be uninhabitable after the Hayward Fault ruptures, the fault about which USGS seismologist Tom Brocher says, “It’s locked and loaded and ready to fire.”

How about it? No more denial, get your bids and get that retrofit done.

If you want to know more about retrofits and how they work, there’s a free seminar this Saturday morning, June 10, at 10 a.m. at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda, Berkeley.

It will cover the basics and make you knowledgeable about choosing a retrofit contractor.

A Red Cross survey found 80 percent of Bay area homeowners are not ready for a Big One. The retrofitted houses are the ones that will survive.

Larry Guillot is owner of QuakePrepare, an earthquake consulting, securing, and kit supply service in the east bay. www.quakeprepare.com

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Aquatic Park, until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon is cancelled today. For information on future events, please call 526-2925.

Berkeley Critical Mass Bike Ride meets at the Berkeley BART the second Friday of every month at 5:30 p.m.

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. 548-6310.

SATURDAY, JUNE 10

Live Oak Park Fair Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. featuring 125 artists and craftspeople. Free. Free shuttles provided from the North Berkeley BART Station to the park. 898-3282. www.liveoakparkfair.com

Health Fair with informational workshops, screenings, fun and giveaways for the whole family from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the social hall and parking lot of 6401 San Pablo Ave., Oakland.

Walk on the Wild Side A 5.5 mile hike over varied terrain to investigate wildlife, wildflowers and a wild watershed. Meet at 9 p.m. at the Wildcat/Alvarado staging are in Tilden Park. Bring a sack lunch, water and sunscreen. 525-2233.

“Backyard Habitat” a workshop to learn about the wildlife native to the area, what they need to secure food and shelter from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at De Anza High School, 5000 Valley View Road, Richmond. Free. 665-3538. www.spawners.net

Full Moon Walk at John Muir National Historic Site A walk to the top of Mt. Wanda, in Martinez, to see the full moon, and nocturnal animal life along the way. Free, but reservations required. 925-228-8860.

Mini-Farmers in Tilden A farm exploration program, from 10 to 11 a.m. for ages 4-6 years, accompanied by an adult. We will explore the Little Farm, care for animals, do crafts and farm chores. Wear boots and dress to get dirty! Fee is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684.

Cerrito Creek Work Party Meet at at 10 a.m. at the end of Adams St., one block west of San Pablo, to remove invasives. 848-9358. www.fivecreeks.org

La Pena’s 31st Birthday Open house and performances by artists and groups who have had long association with La Peña, at 6 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Free. 654-9587.

Trees are Treasures Learn about the diverse tree species in Tilden on a 2 mile walk at 2 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center. 525-2233.

People’s Park Community Garden Tour Learn about native and edible plants with long time gardener, Terri Compost. Hear some history and find out how to get involved and garden in this unique and special place. Meet at 1 p.m. at the South West (Bongo Burger) corner of the People’s Park Community Garden. 658-9178.

Make Your Own Liquid Fertilizers A workshop to learn how to turn weeds and other natural byproducts into plant fertilizers. Bring 2 liter plastic bottles, old hoses or bicycle tubes, cardboard or newspaper, large containers or 5 gallon buckets with lids, misc. tools, and leave with a system of your own. From 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Berkeley Eco-House, 1305 Hopkins St. Cost is $1, sliding scale, no one turned away. 547-8715.

Architecture Tour of the Oakland Museum’s Building and Gardens at 1 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Free. 238-3818.

“Disaster Then and Now: Ready or Not?” Earthquake discussion at 2 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Free. 238-3818.

Art Book Sale including catalogs, journals and magazines from the Museum’s own collection as well as donations from private collections. From 1 to 4 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Free. 238-3818.

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712.

Sunday Summer Forum: Towards a More Just World with Pierre Laboissiere, Haiti Action Committee, at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306.

Tibetan Buddhism with Readings from Voice of the Buddha on “Buddha’s Enlightenment” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812.

MONDAY, JUNE 12

World Affairs/Politics Discussion Group for people 60+ years old meets at 10:15 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Cost is $2.50. 524-9122.

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. 548-0425.

TUESDAY, JUNE 13

Return of the Over-the-Hills Gang Hikers 55 years and older who are interested in nature study, history, fitness, and fun are invited to join as we circumnavigate Round Top, one of the highest peaks in the Berkeley hills and a center of ancient volcanic activity. From 10 a.m. to noon. To register call 525-2233.

Berkeley High School Site Council meets at 4:30 p.m. in Room D218 of the Admin building. The agenda includes 10th grade counseling (SB813), Site Plan Subcommittee report, School Governance Council Proposal. 525-0124.

Raging Grannies of the East Bay invites new folks to come join us from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. to sing (any voice will do), help plan our next gig, or write outrageously political lyrics to old familiar tunes, at Berkeley Gray Panthers, 1403 Addison St., in Andronico’s mall. 548-9696.

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991.

Walking Tour of Old Oakland uptown to the Lake to discover Art Deco landmarks. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of the Paramount Theater at 2025 Broadway. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234.

“How to Run a Successful Co-op and the Co-op Movement,” with Lisa Bruzzone and Cathy Goldsmith of The Cheese Board, at 1:30 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic. All welcome. 524-9122.

East Bay Genealogical Society with Caroline Earhart on her family quilt “My Family’s Road to California” at 10 a.m. in the Library Conference Room of the Family History Center, 4766 Lincoln Ave. Oakland. All welcome. 635-6692.

Celebrate Flag Day at Habitot Children’s Museum by creating a giant community flag from 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 2065 Kittredge St. Cost is $5-$6. 647-1111.

“Girl, I’ve Been Through A Lot..” Poetry workshop for girls age 13 to 17 at 4 p.m. at Oakland Public Library, Room 219, 125 14th St. 238-3134.

Traditional Dances to Reconnect with the Earth at 10:30 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic, Albany. Donation requested. Come alone or with friends. No special agility required. 528-2261.

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. 548-9840.

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6:30 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704.

Jewish Community Federation of the Greater East Bay Annual Meeting at 6:30 p.m. at Congregation Beth El, 1301 Oxford St.

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Sing for Peace at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities.com/

vigil4peace/vigil

THURSDAY, JUNE 15

Family Day at UC Botanical Garden with hands-on activities from 10 a.m. to noon at 200 Centennial Drive. Cost for one parent and one child is $14-$18. Additional adult or children per family are $7 each. Registration required. Space is limited. To register call 643-2755.

Embracing Diversity Films “Out of the Shadow” a documentary of a woman with paranoid schizophrenia, at 7 p.m. at Albany High School Library, 603 Key Route Blvd. Please enter through gym doors on Thousand Oaks Blvd. Suitable for children over 12. Free. Discussion follows. 527-1328.